Promotional and Expository Orientations: A Comparative Genre Analysis of English and Uzbek Research Article Abstracts

Research article abstracts function as both informational summaries and access points to disciplinary knowledge. This study compares the rhetorical organisation and linguistic realisation of English and Uzbek research article abstracts, focusing on promotional and expository orientations. The corpus contains 68 abstracts published between 2023 and 2025, equally divided between English and Uzbek and drawn from four language-related journals. The corpus was analysed through a five-move, fifteen-step model covering Research Territory, Purpose, Method, Results, and Conclusion/Value. Purpose occurred in all 68 abstracts, but Results was central in English and only conventional in Uzbek (100.0% against 64.7%), and a complete five-move configuration occurred in 70.6% of English abstracts against 29.4% of Uzbek abstracts; both differences were statistically significant. English abstracts more often constructed a concise research niche, identified data and analytical procedures, stated a recoverable study-specific finding, and separated the contribution from the result. These functions were commonly realised through finite active research verbs, explicit grammatical subjects, evidential reporting frames, and contribution verbs. Uzbek abstracts more frequently fore-grounded disciplinary or practical relevance, coordinated operational objectives, inventories of methods, and recommendations, using nominal-predicative purpose constructions, action nominals, passive predicates, and extended sen-tence complexes. Consequently, the English corpus displays a relatively stronger promotional-completion orientation, whereas the Uzbek corpus displays a relatively stronger contextual-expository orientation. These are corpus-level tendencies rather than fixed cultural properties, and they reflect the interaction of linguistic resources, journal expectations, disciplinary practice, and anticipated readership.