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) are fairly limited. This study involved compiling a corpus of 8,500 RA abstracts sampled from five disciplines of economics, law, political sciences, psychology, and sociology in social and behavioural sciences. Three to nine-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). Eventually, ngrams were processed at multiple levels and synthesized into 84 move-marker structures. This study offers insights into the linguistic realizations of moves in RA abstracts and introduces the concept of movemarker structures. In so doing, the potentials of positionally variable move-marker structures in improving English for Academic Purposes (EAP)/English for Specific Purposes (ESP) learners’ phraseological competence are suggested.
