چکیده:
Publishing in English has brought about great difficulties for scholars whose first language is not English. After submitting their manuscripts to English-language journals, they usually receive comments from the reviewers on the quality of their English. One of these challenges is how links and transitions are managed in the flow of discourse. The present study aimed to investigate how the successfully revised text differs from its originally submitted counterpart within the framework of systemic functional linguistics. Based on our examination of the revisions made to our corpus, the increased use of marked theme is believed to contribute significantly to textual cohesion and coherence, and thereby to the achievement of the writer’s argument. This would contribute to transforming a relatively immature and unpublishable piece of writing into a well-crafted and mature version. However, this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the texts to be published.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Keywords: Manuscripts revision; Scholarly publication; Academic discourse; Textual Meaning; Theme; Systemic Functional Linguistics *Received date: 2020/01/02 Accepted date: 2020/06/01 **E-mail: maniatim@yahoo.
In the context of Iran, Jalilifar (2010) used Halliday’s (1985) categorization of themes as well as the revised model of TP patterns proposed by McCabe (1999) to compare different thematic choices and TP patterns employed in the four rhetorical sections of Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRD) in ELT, an international journal, and Roshd, a local, peer-reviewed journal.
In another study, Ebrahimi and Khedri (2011) explored the ways thematic structures were utilized in research article abstracts by writers from different disciplines in different academic discourse communities when they were contributing their new knowledge in this section of their articles.
Rather, there are a number of individuals collectively termed shapers (Burrough- Boenisch, 2003) of the research article which have a decisive role, one way or another, in bringing the texts into line with the linguistic and genre conventions of the discourse communities in which the NNES scholars seek publication.
Data analysis Quantitative analysis Although the Introduction and Discussion sections have been said to be potentially more significant for linguistic analysis and more difficult to write (Bahrami & Riazi, 2009; Feldman, 2004; Flowerdew, 1999a; Gosden, 1995; St. John, 1987; Swales & Feak, 1994), we analyzed all the four sections of research articles, namely Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the writing problems of the scholars as well as to test the possibility of challenging the speculations raised by these authors.