A Local Grammar Analysis Of Rhetorical Moves In Introductions Of Applied Linguistics Research Articles

With English rapidly becoming a lingua franca of professional and academic discourse,a vast number of studies on academic writing have been devoted to English research articles(RAs).The Introduction section,as a miniature of RAs,is extremely important as it is directly related to whether anonymous peer reviewers can be convinced of the innovative significance of the research,which in turn affects whether the paper can be published in international journals.In particular,following the proposal of Swales’ pioneering move-step framework,CARS(Create a Research Space)model,research article introductions(RAIs)have received a great interest.However,after searching the database of CNKI,Web of Science,Elsevier and Springer,to the author’s knowledge,none of the research to date has investigated RAIs from a local grammar perspective,which has been shown to be useful for linguistic analysis.Situated within the framework of Corpus Linguistics,local grammar is a brand-new approach to the description of language in use.Each local grammar deals with one targeted meaning or function only and it uses context-specific terms(e.g.,Apologizer,Apologizee)instead of traditional grammatical ones(e.g.,Subject,Object)to describe corresponding formal elements,thereby contributing to the transparency and specificity of the description.With regard to the benefits of local grammar,the present study attempts to explore the feasibility of constructing a set of local grammars to account for RAIs in the field of Second Language Education in Applied Linguistics with Swales’ CARS model as framework and Sinclair’ s theory on extended unit of meaning as reference for research method.More specifically,this study aims to(1)investigate the rhetorical move-step structure in RAIs in the field of Second Language Education;(2)identify the recurrent lexical-grammatical patterns in these moves and steps;(3)describe these lexical-grammatical patterns in terms of local grammar.To achieve the research purposes,a corpus consisting of 200 RAIs from 7representative English journals in the field of Second Language Education was self-constructed and the the sum of tokens in the corpus reaches 157217.Following both corpus-based and corpus-driven approach,this study first conducted a move-step analysis on the collected RAIs.Then drawing on the theory of extended unit of meaning,typical lexical-grammatical patterns in each step were identified with the aid of Ant Conc 3.5.9.Next,based on the identified patterns,various functional categories were proposed according to The Principle of Transparency and The Principle of Economy.The last step was to map these labels to corresponding formal elements,which led to the identification of resulting local grammars.The major findings for this study can be summarized as follows:(1)The original Swales’ CARS model captures mostly the rhetorical structure of RAIs in Second Language Education except some steps with 78% RAIs adopting all three moves in the model.To deal with the departures,an adapted CARS model is constructed.(2)Only 31% data in the current corpus follow the Move 1(Establishing a territory)-Move 2(Establishing a niche)-Move 3(Occupying the niche)move structure,the expected move pattern of CARS model.Among the moves,Move 1 and Move 3 are more predominant than Move 2.In terms of steps,Step 2 in Move 1(Making topic generalizations)and Step 1 in Move 3(Announcing present research descriptively and/or purposively)occur most frequently while the rest seven steps in Move 3 are seldom used by academic writers in Second Language Education.(3)The local grammar approach can offer a functional-grammatical description of language used in RAIs.Specifically,a set of 46 local grammars comprising several typical lexical-grammatical patterns paired with their discourse-semantic patterns in RAIs is identified in this study.The analyses indicate that local grammar attaches importance to the function language fulfills in academic contexts and analyzes each linguistic element in terms that are directly connected with its communicative function.Hence,the resulting descriptions are functional and straightforward.The findings of this study can not only enhance novice researchers’ understanding of the rhetorical organization of RAIs in Second Language Education,but also enlarge their repertoire of linguistic resources for performing a particular communicative function in writing RAIs in Second Language Education.