Abstract:
This study aims to investigate the semantic and syntactic features of verbs used in the introduction section of Applied Linguistics research articles published in Iranian and international journals. A corpus of 20 research article introductions (10 from each journal) was used. The corpus was analysed for the syntactic features (tense, aspect and voice) and semantic meaning of verbs. The findings showed that in both groups of introductions, the common tenses were the present and past, rather than future. In introductions published in the international journal, the present tense was used more often than in those published in the Iranian journal, whereas past tense was used twice as frequently in Iranian journal introductions. Regarding the aspect of verbs, the simple aspect was common in both groups of introductions, but more frequent in Iranian journal introductions. The perfect aspect was more common in international journal introductions. Concerning voice, the active voice was predominant in both groups of introductions. Semantically, verbs with mental, activity, communication and existence meanings were common in both groups. The semantic meanings of verbs were not significantly different in the two groups of introductions. The findings of this study can have implications for novice, non-native writers in Applied Linguistics in helping them design and write more appropriate research article introductions.
Machine summary:
com Abstract This study aims to investigate the semantic and syntactic features of verbs used in the introduction section of Applied Linguistics research articles published in Iranian and international journals.
The findings of this study can have implications for novice, non- native writers in Applied Linguistics in helping them design and write more appropriate research article introductions.
Keywords: verb, tense, aspect, voice, semantic meaning, syntactic analysis Introduction An experimental research article (RA) is a text in which the developmental stages of a scientific experiment are documented.
Review of Literature In the last three decades, a number of researchers have studied research article introduction sections (RAIs) from one or more disciplines, in order to investigate rhetorical structure and/or linguistic features (Gledhill, 2000; Samraj, 2002; Fakhri, 2004; Hirano, 2009; Ozturk, 2007; Loi and Evans, 2010; Sheldon, 2011; Martin and Perez, 2014).
Therefore, this study aims to study the semantic and syntactic features of verbs used in the RA introduction sections of Applied Linguistics research articles published in Iranian local journals and in ISI international journals.
The difference could be attributed to the different natures of the disciplines: the present study focused on RAIs from Applied Linguistics, whereas Li and Gee (2009) analysed medical RAIs. The predominance of the simple tense could be due to realizing steps in RAIs, such as making topic generalizations, indicating the research gap, outlining purposes, outlining principal findings and implications, and indicating the research article structure (Examples 1–6).