Research article titles in applied linguistics

Abstract

With increasing diversification of research, a research article depends much upon the title to encapsulate its distinctive content. The present study aims to examine the syntactic structures and functions of research article titles in applied linguistics. Using a corpus of 796 titles from four journals that are included in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), we identified five syntactic structures, namely, compound, nominal, full-sentence, V-ing phrase, and prepositional phrase. Of the five structures, compound titles, which enable research article writers to present dual foci of studies, constitute more than half of the occurrences, followed by nominal titles, which can concisely summarize the essence of studies. Each of the other three structures accounts for a very small percentage. A second-phase analysis was performed on the two constituent elements of the compound titles and on the heads and modifiers of the nominal titles. For the former, a total of eleven categories were found, revealing a wide variety of crucial aspects of research in applied linguistics, including mainly Topic-Scope, Topic-Method, Topic-Description, Topic-Source, Metaphor-Topic, and Topic-Question. For the nominal titles, both discipline-specific and non-discipline-specific heads were recognized. A majority of the discipline-specific heads are compound nouns, and prepositional phrases are widely used as post-modifiers. The analysis results provide useful information for the academic writing pedagogy.