The aim of the research is to find out the formal and semantic features of abstracts to modern books on linguistics. The following tasks were performed to achieve this aim: to characterize the compositional and information structure, as well as linguistic and stylistic means of abstracts; to find out factors influencing the choice of form and content of the secondary document. Descriptive, comparative, bibliographic, bibliographic-functional methods, partly structural-typological, as well as social-communication-informational and documentary approaches were used. The scientific novelty of the research is that for the first time the texts of abstracts to scientific and popular science books on linguistics were analyzed comprehensively, in the unity of form and content. The material of the research in a specific academic field made it possible to consider the abstracts objectively, not in general, and to illustrate their features through examples. As the results of the study, it was found that abstracts to scientific publications can be marked, unmarked and mixed according to the structural and compositional features. The markers ensure coherence of the text, they organize and structure it. Unmarked abstracts inform about the publication in any form, highlighting the same information elements of the book’s content (novelty of the material, aspects of the study, its source base, results, etc.). A typical abstract to monographs on linguistics is an indicative two-paragraph text, which is organized with the help of markers and provides information about the thematic and semantic features of the specialist work of writing. The choice of the form and content of the abstract depends on the type of the primary document and on the type of the abstract by functional purpose. Abstracts to scientific publications are objective and moderate, while abstracts to popular science books are characterized by expressiveness, imagery, richness of linguistic and stylistic means.