Demonstrates the structure of exemplification in applied linguistics articles, suggesting a framework for deeper understanding.
Exemplification is commonly used in academic writing to help readers understand the author’s intended meaning and to promote information exchange. Despite its importance in knowledge construction and communication, exemplification has received limited scholarly attention. This study addressed this gap by examining exemplification in research articles in applied linguistics to provide an exemplification frame for the field. Applying Fillmore’s (1976) frame semantics as a theoretical foundation, a corpus of 80 research articles was compiled to analyze exemplification expressions. Our analysis revealed 13 exemplification markers that evoke five exemplification-related frames defined in FrameNet (i. e., Increment, Instance, Specific_individual, Inclusion, and Exemplar), encompassing 22 frame elements. Based on the semantic overlap and importance of these elements, we constructed an exemplification frame featuring two core frame elements ( Type and Instance ) and two non-core frame elements ( Initial_set and Instance_prop ). This frame elucidates the rhetorical and cognitive functions of exemplification, offering a valuable conceptual tool to deepen our understanding of its heuristic role in academic discourse.
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Liu et al. (2026) studied this question.
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