Marked Theme in Research Article Introductions: A Cross Disciplinary Study

This study intends to explore the types, frequency and communicative purposes of the marked theme in research article introductions from four disciplines. A corpus of 40 research article introductions from four disciplines, namely applied linguistics, psychology, chemistry and environmental engineering, was selected to meet the aim of this study. The research article introductions were extracted from research articles published in 2009–2013 issues of international high-impact journals. The corpus was analyzed adopting Ebrahimi (2014) taxonomy. The findings suggested that the selection of marked theme types, frequency and communicative purposes of the marked theme types are imposed by the nature of discipline or rhetorical purpose of the research article introduction. Thus, novice (especially non-native) writers must keep the disciplinary and rhetorical purposes of the research article introduction in mind while writing up this section.