What is in the paragraphs of various sections of research articles?

Abstract

This paper strives to uncover the leading paragraph build-up patterns in academic writing. It employs the framework pioneered by Mathesius (1942/1982) and Daneš (1994, 1995), and elaborated on by Pípalová (2005, 2008a, 2008b, 2014). The corpus assembled for the study involves three distinct sections of Research Articles, viz. Abstracts, Introductions and Conclusions. The research confirms the general prevalence of Broad P-theme paragraphs, especially the Content Frame categories. It also demonstrates that non-canonical (i.e. transitional and peripheral) forms of paragraph build-up tend to prevail and identifies a number of factors at play. The paper also shows that the distribution of paragraph patterns is not homogeneous and appears to change across the space of the Research Articles.