Conjunctive Adverbials Viewed as Pragmatic Markers in the Genre of Research Articles

Intercultural variation in academic discourse: Theme zones and the build-up of coherence in research articles

“…In terms of individual disciplines, the most dramatic difference is in the case of literature research articles in both sub-corpora, as these employ only a small number of abstract rhetors; in fact, the majority of the abstract rhetors mentioned above did not occur in literature articles at all, which confirms the fact that individual academic disciplines do not mediate reality in the same way (cf. Hůlková, 2017).…”

“…Moreover, however is among the most frequent conjunctive adjuncts in the genre of research articles (cf. Biber et al, 1996;Hůlková, 2017) and consequently its constant presence in academic writing can be considered as automatic, expected or even desired, which is especially relevant in articles by non-native speakers (i.e. Czech EAL authors) who want to meet all the requirements of a high-quality research paper not only in terms of content but also form.…”

Adverbial cohesion in English-medium academic prose: disciplinary and linguacultural considerations

“…Similar tendencies are observed with respect to the different LA categories, as for instance, in the BNC adversative LAs are less frequent in speaking or fiction than in academic prose (Liu 2008), whereas in short stories falling actions are often signalled with temporal LAs (Wong and Lim 2014). In English academic settings, LAs have been reported to be more frequent in textbooks than in research articles (RAs) (Hyland 1999), more popular in non-science than in science disciplines (Peacock 2010), more common in Conclusions than in Abstracts and Introductions (Hůlková 2017), more willingly used by English L2 speakers than by their English L1 counterparts (Gao 2016). Other studies have shown that certain rhetorical functions of academic texts are recurrently assisted by the use of specific LA types, as for example, gaps in earlier research in management RAs are often indicated by concessive adverbials (Lim 2012), whereas research questions in doctoral dissertations are marked by appositive adverbials (Lim 2014).…”

“…Within this growing body of research there can be identified gaps that merit further investigation. First, while patterns of LA use in English-medium RAs have been analysed across the hard/soft divide (Peacock 2010;Gao 2016;Hůlková 2017) or within individual disciplines (applied linguistics, Lei 2012;engineering, Carrió-Pastor 2013), it seems that a comparison of medicine and psychology has skipped the attention of scholars. Second, the investigated RAs usually come from leading journals published in an international context, leaving in relative neglect the national context of publication.…”

“…al. (1985) (Carrió-Pastor 2013 or Biber et al (1999) (Peacock 2010;Hůlková 2017), and those that employ the taxonomy by Liu (2008) focus on variation in the use of the main LA categories (Lei 2012;Gao 2016), without carefully considering their numerous subcategories. Fourth, while the effect of different linguacultural backgrounds on articulating discourse structure in academic English has been examined in the writings of authors of diverse national origins, the Polish cultural setting appears as underresearched.…”