Comparison is a core cognitive operation in scientific reasoning and a key discourse act in academic English, yet its grammatical realization and diachronic development remain underexplored. Drawing on a corpus of 480 research articles, this study investigates how the use of comparison markers has changed over four decades and across disciplinary groupings (hard vs. soft; applied vs. pure). The results show a diachronic rise in comparison markers, with the growth in contrast markers concentrated in hard disciplines. Cross-disciplinary analysis reveals distinct preferences for the grammatical encoding of contrast and similarity subtypes. These findings highlight the influence of institutional shifts and epistemological orientations on the development of written academic English.
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Wang et al. (2026) studied this question.
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