Lexical-grammatical Variation In Research Articles In Applied Linguistics

Disciplinary writing has become one of the most prominent research subjects in the linguistic field over the past few decades.Substantial studies have investigated language use in relation to specific disciplinary practices-from vocabulary use to phraseological patterns,and from grammatical characteristics to discourse structures.There also has been a large amount of research on linguistic variations across the four sections(introduction,method,results and discussion)of research articles.However,a limited body of empirical research has explored linguistic variation in different types of research articles(i.e.,qualitative research articles,quantitative research articles,and evaluative research articles)in the same discipline.In fact,the differing nature of research may lead to substantial linguistic differences in research articles.To date,few studies have ever captured these linguistic differences.Thus,the goal of the present study is to investigate internal linguistic variation in different types of research articles in the same discipline.In the study,three corpora(i.e.,Quantitative Research Articles corpus,Qualitative Research Articles corpus,and Evaluative Research Articles corpus)were built,each containing 0.9 million,2 million,and 1million words,respectively.All the articles were taken from high quality academic journals in applied linguistics.The study compared the distribution of a set of core lexical and grammatical categories(i.e.,semantic classes of nouns and verbs,passive voice,verb tense,and personal pronouns)in these three types of journal articles.The study showed that the use of core lexical and grammatical features varies systematically across three types of research articles.First,human nouns,place nouns,and group nouns are the most common in qualitative research articles while these nouns are the least frequent in quantitative research articles.Process nouns and quantity nouns occur most frequently in quantitative research articles.Evaluative research articles rely on abstract nouns andtechnical nouns most.As for verbs,activity verbs and existence verbs occur most frequently in qualitative research articles while least frequently in evaluative research articles.Communication verbs and mental verbs are the most common in evaluative research articles and quantitative research articles respectively.Second,with respect to passive voice,agentless passives and passives with by-phrase are the most frequent in quantitative research articles,followed by qualitative research articles.Passive voice is relatively rare in evaluative research articles.Quantitative research articles and qualitative research articles are characterized by their high reliance on past tense while evaluative research articles rarely use past tense forms.Third,personal pronouns are the most frequent in qualitative research articles and the least in evaluative research articles.The findings of this study would enhance a comprehensive understanding of linguistic variation in research articles and provide implications for corpus design and future corpus-related register analysis.