Abstract:
Development of science and academic knowledge has led to changes in academic language and transfer of information and knowledge. In this regard, the present study is an attempt to investigate lexico-grammaticality in academic abstracts and their full research papers in Linguistics, Chemistry and Electrical engineering papers published during 1991-2015 in academic journals from a diachronic perspective through quantitative research design. The focus of this paper is on transitivity, mood and theme analysis in the corpus according to Halliday's (1994) systemic functional linguistics model. So, all the attempts are to find the changes in abstracts and research papers of these disciplines and how they are to be positioned in different linguistic contexts over time. The results revealed that research papers employ the spectrum of possible lexical realization quite differently as compared to general English, especially concerning the use of specific lexical items. Also, the results of chi-squares of each discipline showed that there are significant differences between papers over time at .05 level of significance (.000< .05) with regard to the transitivity, mood, and theme.
Machine summary:
"In this regard, the present study is an attempt to investigate lexico-grammaticality in academic abstracts and their full research papers in Linguistics, Chemistry and Electrical engineering papers published during 1991-2015 in academic journals from a diachronic perspective through quantitative research design.
The purpose of the study is to investigate lexico-grammaticality in academic abstracts and research papers from a diachronic perspective by following Systemic Functional Linguist theory and to find how the linguistic characteristics of these texts developed and changed within a span of time.
The principles suggested by Nwogu (1997, as cited in Zhen-ye, 2008) as to the selection of journal were adopted in the study—representative samples which show the coverage of the topic areas and its reliability to represent the expected discourse community that for this study is the linguistics, chemistry, and electrical engineering genres, reputation which refers to the importance and acceptance of the journal within the discourse community, and accessibility which concerns the availability of the journal to the researcher.
The most frequent lexical items of the three disciplines were nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs for the abstracts and their full research papers in the corpus were presented as follows.
The data showed significant differences across the different fields of study, consisting of linguistics, chemistry, and electrical engineering, not only within abstracts but also within the research papers for the selected linguistic features.
In particular, the analysis of linguistic features revealed statistically significant differences between the abstracts and their full research papers at both lexical and grammatical levels over time as well as a significant difference across the different disciplines."