A Corpus-based Study Of Signalling Nouns In Journal Articles Of Business Disciplines

Signalling nouns are prevalent in academic discourse,functioning to establish continuity through encapsulation or prospection.A fundamental objective of writing research articles in an academic field is to build a discipline-specific community,in which the texts are coherently and cohesively organized to make sure the disciplinary knowledge could be presented and transferred to the target readers comprehensively.However,little attention has been paid to the comparative study of signalling items in business-oriented disciplines,especially for that in accounting,economics and marketing.This thesis thus aims to conduct a corpus-based comparative study of signalling nouns(SNs)in journal articles of accounting,economics and marketing.The overall research objective is decomposed into four closely-related research questions: 1)What is the overall distribution of investigated signalling nouns in the discipline of accounting,economics and marketing? 2)How do different categories of SNs distribute in each discipline? 3)What are the characteristics of individual SN usages? 4)What factors can contribute to the observed patterns,if any? In order to address the above research questions,this study relies on 429 research articles of the three corpora—corpus of economics journal articles(CEJA),corpus of marketing journal articles(CMJA)and corpus of accounting journal articles(CAJA),and data in the corpus are extracted and analyzed with the aid of the corpus tool AntConc 3.5.0.The results show that: 1)On the whole,CAJA encompasses the largest bank of SNs followed by marketing,with economics being the least.2)The combination of ideas,facts and modal facts dominates the overall use of signalling nouns,with a total percentage of 76.10%,78.06%,and 76.17% respectively in each corpus,followed by circumstantial facts,acts and locutions.Differently,CEJA prefers to use facts to present known information.In CAJA,nouns reporting ideas are mostly used,but remain a similar percentage with fact nouns and modal facts.CMJA shows a preference for modal facts and ideas rather than facts to realize the interpersonal meaning.3)There are many discipline-neutral SNs responsible for constructing academic community of journal articles,as well as discipline-specific SNs closely associated with the nature of the discipline,contributing to disciplinary variations,like disclosure,announcement,vulnerability,sensitivity,assurance in accounting;variable,utility,restriction,resistance in economics;and feeling,motive,pain,action in marketing.4)The common grounds of SN usages lie in expressing a formal tone of professional research articles and enacting social relationships with addressees.On the other hand,the differences in the use of SNs are closely related to the unique field of participants and process types in each discipline.This study provides both methodological and pedagogical implications for EAP practitioners,including teachers and learners in the cognition and practices of SNs,as well as for the experts and scholars in the field of economics,marketing and accounting in disciplinary studies.