Cause-effect patterns in the discussion sections of articles in language studies journals: The discourse of scientific explanation across language sub-disciplines

Abstract

One of the basic goals of academic research is to explain the phenomena that researchers observe through causal relations. From a discursive perspective, however, how cause-effect patterns (CEPs) are reflected in academic writing is a major question to be investigated. Meanwhile, a problem is that sub-disciplines exploring human sciences may exhibit radical variations in terms of their discursive use of cause-effect patterns. Language studies is an umbrella term that encompasses many disciplines, including literature, language teaching, translation studies and linguistics. On a surface level, because such disciplines address language, one may assume that they follow similar ways of explaining language-related phenomena. This article is based on findings obtained from a study of the cause-effect patterns in 60 discussion sections randomly selected from 12 high-impact journals in four sub-disciplines of language studies. It aims to (i) categorise the types of the cause-effect patterns into ‘cause in focus’ and ‘effect in focus’, (ii) identify the most frequently used cause-effect signals, and (iii) ascertain whether there is any significant difference between the sub-disciplines in terms of their use of cause-effect patterns. Based on Fisher’s exact test, the findings reveal that a significant difference exists between the sub-disciplines in terms of their use of cause-effect patterns, and they also suggest that language teaching papers use the highest number of cause-effect patterns and thus were remarkably explanatory in explicating the phenomena they dealt with.