An Exploratory Analysis of Linking Adverbials in Research Articles Across Different Disciplines

Writing empirical research papers that comply with disciplinary conventions is a goal that many students, especially at the tertiary level, aspire to achieve. While playing a crucial role in constructing coherent texts, linking adverbials are typically depicted as a static collection of interchangeable elements lacking inherent meaning, and often receiving minimal consideration for their discipline-specific functions. Most of the previous studies on linking adverbials have focused on the frequency of use across different proficiency levels; there has been little corpus-based research on how these connectives function across different disciplines. This paper examines the potential variations in the use of linking adverbials in Nursing and Applied Linguistics empirical research articles. Using AntConc software, a corpus of eighty research articles, 40 articles in Nursing and another 40 in Applied Linguistics, were compared in terms of their frequency use, function, and placement preferences of linking adverbials. Findings revealed that the two corpora differ considerably in frequency, semantic function, and, to a lesser extent, the placement of linking adverbials in each discipline. Such variations are attributed mainly to the way linking adverbials are used to present and strengthen authors' arguments in each discipline.