Cohesive Conjunctions in Applied Linguistics Research Articles among Iranian and Non-Iranian Researchers: A Comparative Corpus-based Study

Cohesion as a major component of language ability plays a significant role in connecting the sentences and paragraphs of texts together. Rare studies, if any, investigated cohesive conjunctions in applied linguistics research articles written by Iranian and non-Iranian researchers. The present study aimed to fill this gap. To this end, one hundred and seventy-five original articles written by Iranian authors, published in the years 2015-2019 in the field of applied linguistics in Scopus-indexed international journals and 174 original articles in the same field written by Iranian and non-Iranian authors with similar indexing features were selected through a purposive sampling method. Then, the frequency of conjunctions and their respective tokens were identified based on the taxonomy provided by Halliday and Hasan (1976). The analysis of the data based on frequency count and chi-square analysis revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between types and their tokens in the two corpora. Moreover, the findings demonstrated that in both corpora additives were most frequently used, while adversative were at the minimum level of application. It may be concluded that non-Iranian applied linguistics research articles enjoy more cohesion than Iranian ones as far as conjunctions are concerned. However, further studies are needed to examine other features of cohesion to substantiate this finding. The present study may have practical implications for both writers as well as EFL/ESL students.