abstract

The article discusses changes in scientific communication that are related to its transfer to a digital environment. The authors aim to reveal structural and semiotic transformations that the genre of scientific article undergoes in the context of transition from paper to a digital format. To this end, the characteristics of the genre in its traditional printed format are compared to the characteristics of scientific articles as they are presented in the electronic versions of journals.

The article analyzes linguistic means used for boosting which is considered a crucial metadiscourse strategy regularly employed in the genre of research article abstracts. The study aims at identifying the types of booster and the frequency of occurrence of boosting markers in Russian-language research article abstracts in the field of soft and hard sciences. The study makes an attempt to reveal differences in the use of these metadiscourse patterns and suggest reasons for the uneven distribution of boosters in the two corpora.