Streszczenie, abstrakt, adnotacja i ich funkcja w tekście naukowym

Abstract

In my article, I discuss selected concepts of summaries, I analyze understanding of the concept and its synonyms (based on data excerpted from encyclopedias and dictionaries concerning the knowledge of the book and from dictionaries of the Polish language). An overview of these definitions reveals the blurring of concepts and partial overlap of their ranges. Summary in the dictionaries of the Polish language is quoted more often, it is an universal genre and for an abstract (as a specialized term) it is a hypernonym. You can summarize something which has already happened or a text which has already been written, whereas the abstract may arise before writing a text (as a preview). After analyzing selected examples of summaries, abstracts and annotations I discuss their main objectives and functions in scientific texts: information about the contents of the full text, make the search processes faster and test different mental skills. A summary can also be considered as a kind of metatext – “the text about the text”. Summaries and abstracts are becoming a “showcase” of the main text and its author. However, the structure of the abstract – thematic or thematic‑rhematic – depends of the value and usefulness to readers.