Abstract:
This study aimed at investigating the tendency of research article (RA) authors for the application of nominalization in RA discussion sections from the perspective of two discourse communities. To this end, 150 RA discussion sections were selected from local and international Applied Linguistics journals. Following the rhetorical structure analysis of the corpus and the move tagging, the authors analyzed the vertical and horizontal distribution of the nominalization types within and between the journals. The results demonstrated that international RA authors show a greater preference to use nominalization in certain moves of the discussion sections, and this can be explained by considering the move function and nominalization types. It was also revealed that a large number of nominalizations are located in some moves than others. In other words, authors use nominalization in these moves to ameliorate the style and the language of the discussion sections to sound more persuasive. Finally, fine-grained qualitative analyses are presented.
Machine summary:
"Candidate in Applied Linguistics, University of Tehran, Iran Received 5 December 2014; revised 28 Jannnuary 2015; accepted 20 February 2015 Abstract This study aimed at investigating the tendency of research article (RA) authors for the application of nominalization in RA discussion sections from the perspective of two discourse communities.
Considering the importance of nominalization as a functional means of creating easy-to-get-to meanings in the text, or even as a complex grammatical means, what Ventola (1996) termed ‘guild codification’, that is formulated to distinguish the outsiders and novices from well-established members of a discourse community, our study, drawing on Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004) characterization of GM and nominalization, aims to: a) explore how nominalization is deployed across the rhetorical moves of the discussion sections of the English RAs in the journals published in the discipline of applied linguistics in Iran as a foreign language context and the English RAs published at international level in the same discipline; b) compare the distribution of nominalization across the rhetorical moves of the discussion sections of the English RAs in the same journals; c) present an analysis of the semantic/morphological configurations of nominalizations and an analysis of the syntactic constructions containing nominalizations in the international RA discussion sections."