Citation Use In Results And Discussion Sections Of Research Articles Of Applied Linguistics:Cross-Linguistic And Diachronic Comparisons

The need for academic communication and exchange between national and international academics has increased in the past few decades.In the context of English as the lingua franca,rather than taking the English academic writing convention as the norm,due respect should be paid to the variety of writing conventions in discourse communities of different language backgrounds.Given that the existing literature still lacks sufficient understandings of genre features in research writing in different languages and across time development,the present study explores the citation use in research articles from cross-linguistic and diachronic perspectives.Specifically,the study examines the similarities and differences of citation use in the Results and Discussion sections of research articles of applied linguistics between English and Chinese languages,and also between the time phases of 1996-2005 and 2006-2015.The corpus of the study consisted of 120 research articles,randomly selected from three English applied linguistics journals and three Chinese applied linguistics journals from 1996 to 2015.Following the past studies,analysis of citation use was conducted from three dimensions:writer stance(acknowledge,distance,endorse,contest),textual integration(insertion,assimilation,insertion + assimilation)and author integration(integral,non-integral).The study yielded the following findings.Concerning cross-linguistic features,both similarities and differences are found in citation use between English and Chinese research articles.The similarities are found in the frequency use of acknowledge citation,endorse citation,contest citation,and textual integration citations.The differences include that proportionately more integral citations,but less distance citations and non-integral citations are found in Chinese journals as compared with those in English journals.The finding partly suggests that the Chinese research articles may have a tendency to highlight the authority in their source use.This also indicates that both similarities and differences of rhetorical preferences in citation use exist in discourse communities that differ in their language backgrounds.Concerning diachronic features,both similarities and differences of citation use are also found with time change.In the two groups of research articles in 1996-2005 and 2006-2015,similarities are identified in the frequency use of acknowledge citation,endorse citation,contest citation,insertion + assimilation citation and author integration citations.Less frequent use is found with distance citation and insertion citation,while more use of assimilation citation is found in research articles published from 2006 to 2015,as compared to those from 1996 to 2005.The results seem to suggest that the citing conventions in the field of applied linguistics are dynamically conserved,thus confirming the inherent feature of the writing conventions of discourse communities.The study may have some implications.The findings concerning both cross-linguistic and diachronic similarities and differences of citation use in academic writing may further our understanding of the conventions in different discourse communities.On the pedagogical level,the findings may also shed light on the instruction of citation strategies in academic writing.