The Dispersion of Discourse Markers in Academic Publications: A Comparative Interlanguage Corpus-Assisted Analysis

This study is a comparative interlanguage corpus-assisted analysis of the dispersion of discourse markers in academic publications. This study analyzed 60 published academic articles in accredited journals from Iraqi and native English writers across different disciplines (30 Iraqi English writers, 30 Native English writers). The study was grounded upon Fraser’s (1999) theorization of syntactic-semantic-pragmatic aspects of discourse markers and his triadic classification of discourse markers. Besides, we employed a corpus linguistic tool named AntConc to spot the discourse markers and their frequencies in both Iraqi and Native English corpora. The findings revealed that evaluative discourse markers were the most frequently used discourse markers in both corpora. However, the Iraqi and Native English corpora differed only in the frequencies of the evaluative discourse marker items. This is whilst the inferential discourse markers appeared to be the least frequently used classification in both corpora. The overall frequency analysis indicated that the Iraqi English writers used significantly fewer discourse markers than the native English writers. This finding might be due to the significant typological features of Arabic in discourse organization properties that negatively interfere with the appropriate employment of discourse markers through English texts. In addition to typological differences, we argued that the reduced use of discourse markers in the Iraqi corpus may be due to cultural, structural, language acquisition, identity, and cognitive differences.