A Cross-Cultural Comparative Investigation of Linking Adverbials in Linguistics Research Articles Written in English by Native and Arab Scholars

Abstract

The study reports a comparative investigation into the way Arabic first language (L1) and English native language scholars construct cohesive English texts in linguistics research articles through the use of linking adverbials (LAs). It was framed by Biber et al.'s (1999) classification of LAs. The corpus comprised 80 published research articles in a linguistics journal written in English by native and Arab scholars (304,144 words). Both qualitative and quantitative analyses have been conducted in order to investigate the semantic uses of LAs and their frequencies and percentages. There were overall similarities between the two datasets and slight differences that can be related to cross-cultural and L1 influence. Some Arab scholars had the tendency to overuse additive adverbials by comparison to other LAs. This tendency might be linked to their L1, such as Arabic which heavily uses additive adverbials. The findings revealed the non-native English speaking scholars' (NNES) slight preference for using formal (e.g. 'in order to') over less formal adverbials (e.g. 'so'). The distribution pattern of the categories was similar in both datasets. The study suggests investigating other genres of RAs written within different disciplines.