A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF COHESIVE CONJUNCTIONS IN MEDICAL RESEARCH ARTICLES WRITTEN BY IRANIAN AND NON-IRANIAN AUTHORS

Abstract

Abstract

        Conjunctions are linguistic signposts whose main objective is to restrict the interpretation of  semantic relations which play a pivotal role in the intertextuality of discourse created by text producers/language learners.  As such, this study sought to investigate the use of conjunctions in medical articles written by Iranians and non-Iranian authors with different nationalities. To this end, two targeted corpora of medical research papers were collected using a purposive sampling method. Each corpus comprised 400 articles. Subsequently, 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 no statistically significant difference between types and their tokens in the two corpora. Alternatively, the findings demonstrated that in both corpora additives were most frequently used, while temporals were at the minimum level of application. In addition, in the corpora related to non-Iranian authors adversatives ranked second whereas casuals took the third place. By contrast, in  the Iranian corpora casuals were ranked  second and adversatives occupied the  third frequency rank. The present study may have practical implication for both medical students and writers as well as EFL/ESL students.

Key words: Cohesion, Cohesive Devices, Medical Research Paper, Cohesive Conjunctions