An Analysis of Colligation in Applied Linguistics Research Articles: A cross-sectional comparison

In the last three decades, a great number of studies have been carried out on written academic genres; especially the research articles (RAs) (e.g., Hyland, 2000; Swales, 1990, 2004).The studies on research articles have explored both the discourse structure of various sections in this genre, such as the discussion, as well as patterns of use of linguistic features and various Lexico-grammatical features of the RAs have also been explored. This present study aimed at providing an account of recurrent sets of colligations to which academic words co-occur with in different sections of RAs of applied linguistics including Introductions, Methodology, Result and Discussion. To have a confident source for collecting the corpus for analysis, a minimum of 4 university professors in applied linguistics issues were asked to nominate some high rank journals. Therefore, the RAs were drawn from Asian EFL journal, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Science Directs, Applied Linguistics, ELT Journal suggested journals by these experts. To this end, 50 RAs from very famous applied linguists such as Halliday, Ellis, Swales, Cronk, Conklin, Schmitt, Anderson and some other famous researchers were selected for analysis. The RAs were investigated in order to compare the extent to which candidate words exhibit their preferences or avoidance to occur with particular colligational functions within the discipline of applied linguistics. To this end 4 academic words one noun, one verb, one adjective, and one adverb with high frequency were chosen from the Academic Word List, compiled by Coxhead (2000), and were used as the candidate words of this study.To reveal the possible differences in the colligations of the candidate words in the given sections of RAs and the possible significant relationship between specific sections of articles and the occurrence of an academic word, the collected data were analyzed in terms of frequency of the occurrences of each candidate words with particular colligational functions in terms of tenses, material and relational & mental processes, and the sentential positions in which candidate words occupy namely subject, object, complement, and adjunct. Then, the significance of occurrences of each selected words in different sections were measured by performing chi-square. The result showed that there was a significant relationship between the occurrences of academic words with particular colligations with different sections of RAs. Therefore, it seems that academic words have a meaningful relationship with different sections of RAs which have been discussed in details in the discussion part of this article.