CONJUNCTIVE COHESION IN PAKISTANI RESEARCH ARTICLES: A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS ACROSS DISCIPLINES AND ARTICLE SECTIONS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63878/jalt2180Keywords:
conjunctive cohesion; Pakistani research articles; corpus-based analysis; academic writing; disciplinary variation; article sections; Halliday and Hasan.Abstract
This corpus-based study examines the use of cohesive conjunctions in Pakistani research articles. Drawing on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) classification of additive, adversative, causal, and temporal conjunctions, the study analyzes 400 research articles published in 2017 and 2018 across psychology, engineering, English linguistics, English literature, economics, zoology, information technology, and business. The cleaned corpus consisted of 1,896 section-based files and 1,465,710 words. Multidimensional Analysis Tagger was used for tagging, AntConc for frequency and functional analysis, and SPSS for disciplinary and sectional comparison. The results showed a normalized frequency of 6.441 conjunctions per 1,000 words, indicating moderate use. Additive conjunctions were most frequent, followed by adversative and causal conjunctions, while temporal conjunctions were absent. Functional analysis showed listing, summative, appositional, resultive, inferential, and contrastive uses, but no transitional use. Psychology showed the highest mean frequency and differed significantly from all other disciplines, whereas engineering showed the lowest mean. Results and discussion sections had the highest descriptive frequency, while literature review sections had the lowest; however, sectional differences were not statistically significant. The study concludes that Pakistani research writers use conjunctions productively but unevenly, suggesting the need for explicit academic writing instruction on conjunction types, functions, and section-sensitive cohesive strategies.
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