Lexical Cohesion in Research Articles

This study examines how academic writers use lexical cohesion (LC) in research articles (RAs) and what the features of LC are, since the appropriate use of LC promotes the coherence of academic discourse. Through stratified random sampling, 30 articles were selected from Applied Linguistics. With the adoption of Coh-Metrix and manual coding, the analysis found that repetition was overwhelmingly-used (91%) in scholarly journal writings, whereas hyponymy was adopted least, only occupying 1% collectively. Moreover, the use of LC significantly related to the structure of RAs, that is, Introduction, Methodology, Results and Discussion/conclusion (IMRD) ( = 29.476, p = .000 < .05). LC, as a whole, is most frequently-used in Introduction. The adoption of repetition, synonymy, and meronymy significantly related to IMRD structure. Furthermore, it is assumed that synonymy is prone to be context-dependent, in the meanwhile, hyponymy and antonymy are content-oriented. Ultimately, it is hoped that the ways concluded to use LC can help writers build coherent discourse in academic writings.