Sub-disciplinary variations in marine engineering research article sections.

Abstract

Corpus-based research helps uncover hidden patterns of word choices and linguistic features in a specific genre. So far, abundant corpus research has examined language features within a single discipline and compared them across disciplines. However, little research has attempted to understand whether variations exist within one single discipline, especially in research articles. This study attempted to fill in this gap by investigating potential sub-disciplinary variations in marine engineering research articles. Specifically, the most frequently used nouns and verbs were examined across three subfields in marine engineering and four research article sections. The investigation into the frequent nouns and verbs across three subfields revealed more differences than similarities, confirming the presence of sub-disciplinary variations. In addition, the examination of nouns and verbs across sections also indicated that variations exist across sections and that some words might correspond to the function of each section. Based on these findings, several pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.