Abstract Research article highlights and abstracts have significant roles in presenting and summarizing the findings of academic investigations as well as promoting research studies and enhancing their contributions in the field. While a wealth of research is available on the frequent multi-word units in academic genres, studies that exclusively link lexical sequences to the rhetorical moves in Research Articles (RAs) highlights and abstracts are fairly limited. Furthermore, our review of the literature indicate that while huge efforts have been devoted to rhetorical moves and the lexico-grammatical features of various sections of academic research articles (RAs)including the RA abstracts, studies that have focused on RA highlights and their linguistic characterizations are exceedingly rare. Therefore, the research studies conducted in the present dissertation aimed at identifying the linguistic realizations of the rhetorical moves in RA highlights and abstracts and investigating their linguistic, metadiscursive and promotional characteristics. In doing so, a corpus of 250 RA highlights sampled from five leading journals in applied linguistics and 8,500 RA abstracts sampled from 5 disciplines of economics, law, political sciences, psychology, and sociology in social and behavioral sciences was compiled. Then, 3- to 9-word ngrams were generated using AntConc 3.4.4, which is a freeware corpus analysis toolkit. All the ngrams were studied in their contexts through concordance analysis and classified based on the rhetorical moves in which they occurred using the move structure taxonomy suggested by Hatzitheodorou, (2014) and a model of move structure for RA highlights which was proposed in the present study after classification of 1,116 highlight entries based on their communicative functions using qualitative and quantitative analysis. Eventually, the extracted ngrams were processed at multiple levels and synthesized into 84 move-marker structures. Furthermore, the metadiscursive devices and promotional elements deployed by authors in applied linguistics were examined using Hyland’s (2005) model of stance and engagement as well as Lindeberg’s (2004) taxonomies of direct and indirect promotional steps. The findings of the present dissertation offer insights into the linguistic realizations of moves in RA highlights and abstracts and introduce the concept of move-marker structures. In so doing, the potentials of positionally variable move-marker structures in improving EAP/ESP learners’ phraseological competence are suggested. Moreover, our findings offer insights into the type of entries and the promotional elements used in RA highlights by writers to highlight the value of their research. The pedagogical applications of our findings for academic writing pedagogy are discussed. Keywords: academic writing, highlights, lexical sequences, lexico-grammatical features rhetorical moves, promotional elements, metadiscourse, move-markers
