Mechanical Engineering Academic Discourse: A Corpus-Based Study into Rhetorical Conventions of Research Articles

Abstract

Limited information on discourse in mechanical engineering and lack of resources used for teaching and learning the discipline-specific language emphasise the need for research into mechanical engineering discourse. The thesis examines language use in research articles of the relatively under-researched discipline of mechanical engineering in terms of rhetorical structures and their linguistic correlates by conducting two studies. Study 1 focuses on the prototypicality. It explores and describes the organisational patterns of the whole mechanical engineering article using Swales’s (1990, 2004) conceptualisation of moves and steps, as well as a range of related properties including the range, frequency, length, embedding, and sequence and cycle. As a complement to move analysis, the study identifies multi-word units (n-grams), categorises them structurally and functionally, and examines the structural and functional distribution across the sections and across the rhetorical structures. Study 2 centres on the variability, by examining possible intra-disciplinary differences on three levels: sub-discipline (mechanical systems and thermal-fluids engineering), research tradition (experimental, theoretical and mixed methods), and publication time (2002–2006 and 2006–2012). To fulfil these research objectives, the thesis draws on a corpus of 120 mechanical engineering research articles, equally distributed across the two sub-disciplines, three research traditions, and two publication periods. It adopts an integrated methodology, intertwining various approaches and perspectives including corpus linguistics, move analysis, discourse analysis and interviews. The fine-grained analyses performed in Study 1 yield a rich description of rhetorical features of the mechanical engineering research articles, which reflect the universal characteristics of academic writing in different disciplines as well as the socioepistemological properties of this discipline. The multi-layered analyses undertaken in Study 2 point to substantial yet subtle differences on the three levels in terms of the presentation of different elements of the research space, preferred strategies for gap identification, approaches to validating methods and results, the scale of method validation, methodological aspects that merit more focus, the integration of background knowledge, the type of result presented, how structured the paper is, and phraseological use. The thesis gives a fresh perspective on the well-established move analysis, extends discourse analysis research showing variation in light of discourse structure, expands on the corpus linguistics notions of collocation and cohesion, and advances understandings of inquiry norms and rhetorical conventions in mechanical engineering and its subtribes. The findings have several implications for move analysis, corpus design, and instruction of discipline-specific language.