{"title":"Disciplinary and gender-based variations: A frame-based analysis of interest markers in research articles","authors":"Qian Wang , Guangwei Hu","doi":"10.1016/j.esp.2022.12.006","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Linguistic expressions of interest as emotive responses are not uncommon in academic discourse but have hardly attracted any research attention. This paper reports on a study designed to examine how the deployment of such expressions in academic writing is mediated by an academic author's disciplinary background and gender. Drawing on a semantic frame developed for interest markers found in a corpus of 640 research articles sampled from four disciplines, corpus-based quantitative analyses were conducted on the incidence of the various elements of the Interest frame. Text-based interviews were also conducted with 16 disciplinary informants to explore considerations behind their use of interest markers. The corpus analyses found that although discipline and gender did not reliably predict academic authors' overall use of interest markers, they were robust predictors of several frame elements. The analyses of the interview data revealed that the observed quantitative differences were related to disciplinary knowledge-making practices, knowledge/knower epistemological orientations prevailing in the disciplines, gender-preferential discursive practices and an author's relative status in academia.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47809,"journal":{"name":"English for Specific Purposes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"English for Specific Purposes","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088949062200076X","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Linguistic expressions of interest as emotive responses are not uncommon in academic discourse but have hardly attracted any research attention. This paper reports on a study designed to examine how the deployment of such expressions in academic writing is mediated by an academic author's disciplinary background and gender. Drawing on a semantic frame developed for interest markers found in a corpus of 640 research articles sampled from four disciplines, corpus-based quantitative analyses were conducted on the incidence of the various elements of the Interest frame. Text-based interviews were also conducted with 16 disciplinary informants to explore considerations behind their use of interest markers. The corpus analyses found that although discipline and gender did not reliably predict academic authors' overall use of interest markers, they were robust predictors of several frame elements. The analyses of the interview data revealed that the observed quantitative differences were related to disciplinary knowledge-making practices, knowledge/knower epistemological orientations prevailing in the disciplines, gender-preferential discursive practices and an author's relative status in academia.
期刊介绍:
English For Specific Purposes is an international peer-reviewed journal that welcomes submissions from across the world. Authors are encouraged to submit articles and research/discussion notes on topics relevant to the teaching and learning of discourse for specific communities: academic, occupational, or otherwise specialized. Topics such as the following may be treated from the perspective of English for specific purposes: second language acquisition in specialized contexts, needs assessment, curriculum development and evaluation, materials preparation, discourse analysis, descriptions of specialized varieties of English.