Ashoori, Monire

A Comparative Study of Research Articles in Applied Linguistics and Chemistry: The Case of Emotive Lexis

The present study attempted to analyze the patterns of emotive lexis in two different disciplines of applied linguistics and chemistry research articles. To this end, this study examined the types and tokens of emotive lexis, applied by writers; moreover, the lexical realizations and emotive dimensions were described to show the possible differences between both disciplines. The results showed that both writers in applied linguistic and chemistry primarily used emotive lexis in adjectival/participial forms rather than nominal and adverbial ones. In both corpora, the outer circle emotions or the least intense ones ranked as the largest category, while the inner circle emotions or the most intense ones constituted the smallest proportion. This could be due to the fact that emotions are undeniably ignored in academic discourse. We can also conclude that, while there is no remarkable difference in the preferences of lexical choices (parts-of-speech) and emotion sections of emotive terms used by the writers in both corpora, the writers who majored in applied linguistics, the soft discipline, proved the higher frequency and range in application of emotive lexis, which could be due to the more subjective concepts of soft disciplines rather than the hard ones. By comparing articles written by native English and non-native Farsi professional writers, we found that while native writers used more emotive lexis than Iranian ones, the total range in non-native articles was slightly higher. Additional investigations should take into account different texts, such as dissertations and theses written by native and non-native writers in various disciplines. Moreover, a wide variety of linguistic elements can be investigated for the sake of achieving a more comprehensive representation of academic writing.