ELF in the making? simplification and hybridity in abstract writing

The fact that in the last few decades English has become the international language of scientific communication has brought with it an increasing pressure on non-Anglophone academics to disseminate their research internationally in English. Some disciplinary areas, such as Sociology, which have traditionally been dominated by Anglophone writers, are witness to an increasing number of non-native academics publishing in their most prestigious journals, hosted either in the United States or in Great Britain. This may have implications for the way academic texts are being written. This paper focuses on the evolution of the prestigious journal since it was launched in 1972. My research hypothesis is that the fact that an increasing number of non-Anglophone writers are contributing to the journal may be modifying the rhetorical level of the research article abstracts. The analysis carried out in this study identifies processes of evolution in terms of simplification of the conventional rhetorical structure used for abstracts, and hybridization, which in fact involves a higher degree of textual complexity. The new, hybrid, patterns identified here may be the result of processes of contact and evolution, reshaping old forms into new forms that model English conventional patterns in innovative and creative ways. Further enquiry is needed to test the preliminary results yielded by the present study.