A Contrastive Study on the Utilization of Discourse Markers in the Discussion Section of English Research Articles

Abstract

Cohesion is an important aspect of English texts, and to achieve that, writers utilize certain devices known as Discourse Markers (DMs). This study thus sought to analyze the discussion section of 12 research articles (RAs) published on two different journals (i.e., Language Teaching Research and American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics) which cover contrastive disciplines (i.e., humanities and medicine) so as to find out the most used category of DMs. Additionally, the study aimed at identifying the differences between these two disciplines as to how DMs were utilized. The study thus adopted qualitative methods. That is, the analysis was based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) and Fraser’s (2009) classification frameworks of DMs. Results revealed that elaborative DMs were the most used category of DMs across all the RAs. Furthermore, the LTR corpus exhibited more varieties of DMs than the AJMG corpus in which DMs were less used. Lastly, some suggestions are given for future research that have interest in discourse analysis in general, and in contrastive analysis in particular.