Arts , Humanities & Social Science

Abstract

Horoscopes are in fact the astrological diagrams that show the position of the Sun, Moon and the main planets. They also comprise of the astrological aspects between these elements. Undoubtedly, horoscope is considered one of the most interesting articles in which attention of people from all over the world is captured. There seems to be a rhetorical organization prevailing in any piece of writing assisting to them to overcome successfully difficult reading. This study attempts to identify rhetorical organization, at the level of macrostructure, and linguistic features commonly used in English articles as well as in Russian horoscopes. The study also aims to contrast Move Order in horoscopes of both languages. The research uses qualitative as well as quantitative methods. The corpus encompasses weekly horoscopes in English for 12 zodiac signs for the period from 12/04/2020 to 18/04/2020, and weekly horoscopes in Russian language, also for 12 zodiac signs for the period from 13/04/2020 to 19/04/2020 that results in 24 Horoscope articles. The findings elucidate the template adapted from the framework of move analysis by Swales (it also was mentioned in the previous study) and found respectively five moves forming a typical sequence in a horoscope. Objectively, this study sheds some light on the process itself, how horoscope articles are systematically constructed.