Abstract:
Deducing what a paper is about, titles are considered as the most important determinant of how many people will read the article. Therefore, studying the use of different syntactic structures and their rhetorical functions in titles is of great significance. The current study was set to investigate these structures used in research article titles in three disciplines of Applied Linguistics, Dentistry, and Civil Engineering. To this end, 420 research articles were randomly selected from four reputable journals in each field and their titles were analyzed based on Dietz’s (1995) taxonomy for syntactic structure of article titles. The findings of the study indicated that, although there are some similarities in title structures, there are some discipline specific differences. Such differences observed not only in title components, but also in title length and style. These differences reflect the academic conventions of title construction in different disciplines; moreover, they show communicative or rhetorical features emphasized in characterizing the nature and content of research in that discipline. These findings suggest several courses of action for different members of the English for Specific Purposes community.
Machine summary:
Syntactic Structures in Research Article Titles from Three Different Disciplines: Applied Linguistics, Civil Engineering, and Dentistry Aasa Moattarian∗ MA, TEFL Sheikhbahaee University a.
The current study was set to investigate these structures used in research article titles in three disciplines of Applied Linguistics, Dentistry, and Civil Engineering.
This approach, mainly derived from discourse analysis, has been used in the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) extensively (Bhatia, 2008; Dudley-Evans, 1994; Hyon, 1996; Martín & León Pérez, 2014; Swales, 1990; Wood, 1982, to name just a few).
e. , the studies focused not only on linguistic features such as voice (Tarone, Dwyer, Gillette, & Icke, 1998), tense (Burrough-Boenisch, 2003; Salager- Meyer, 1992 ) and pronouns (Kuo, 1999 ) but also on the major sections of RAs like abstract (e.
However, in the last three decades due to the growing interest in studying titles, they have been studied in different academic genres, such as review papers (Soler, 2007), dissertations (Dudley-Evans, 1984), and research articles (Goodman, 2000; Haggan, 2004; Wang & Bai, 2007).
Method This text-analysis study was set to analyze syntactic structures of 420 RA titles in three disciplines of Applied Linguistics, Dentistry and Civil Engineering published in reputable and authoritative journals indexed in high credit websites such as Elsevier and Sage since 2010.
68% This result clearly corroborates those of previous research on RA titles that found a marked preponderance of nominal constructions over other structures (Busch-Lauer, 2000; Haggan, 2004; Jalilifar, 2010b; Soler, 2007; Wang & Bai, 2007, to name only a few).