Yasunori Nishina

Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values: a Corpus-based Study of Adjective Patterns in Research Articles in Applied Linguistics and Business Studies Yasunori Nishina

This volume explores an important aspect of research on academic discourse and disciplinary culture, with examples given from corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The analysis proceeds through a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the use of language patterns in two large corpora of authentic texts. The empirical focus of the study will be on two 'soft-applied' disciplines (Becher & Trowler, 2001), Applied Linguistics and Business Studies, as represented by two corpora of research articles drawn from 16 leading journals in each field. Comparison of the results for each corpus shows that there are many differences in form and meaning between the two disciplines: it is argued that the features revealed by analysis shown are indicative of the epistemological characteristics of these two different disciplinary discourses. This volume argues that these differences reflect the different academic cultures and norms of Applied Linguistics and Business Studies.