Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

1.5. Outline of the thesis
The current study is divided into 11 chapters. Chapter 2 introduces the concept of discipline,
showing how this concept brings together knowledge, communication, language and
epistemology. It also summarizes previous disciplinary research in applied linguistics and
related fields. The chapter begins by arguing that there is an association between knowledge,
communication and discipline. I then move on to discuss the close relationship between
language and discipline, and provide a short introduction to disciplinary discourse research
before introducing and defining the disciplines of applied linguistics and business studies,
which form the empirical focus of the thesis.
Chapter 3 deals with the major features analysed in the current research. Taking the
idiom principle proposed by Sinclair (1991) at the outset for the discussion, the concepts of
lexico-grammatical patterning, collocation and evaluation are discussed. It is argued that all of
these features are ideal targets for identifying disciplinary differences between applied
linguistics and business studies.
Chapter 4 reviews quantitative approaches in text analysis and presents the rationale
for the application of multivariate analysis in the current study. It also summarizes the
mechanism of correspondence analysis as used in the current study.
Chapter 5 outlines the process of corpus creation, and the general methodology of the
current study.
The aim of Chapter 6 is to provide a case study example of the methodology in
action, focusing on the pattern A DJ about N. The basic approach presented in this chapter is
repeated for each prepositional type of the pattern A DJ PR EP N, but for reasons of space the
results of each of these pattern analyses cannot be presented in full. Instead, those findings are
developed, expanded and generalized in the analyses given by subsequent chapters 7, 8 and 9.
Chapter 7 presents the results of the data analysis for each variant of the pattern A DJ
PR EP N, focusing in particular on the quantitative data yielded by the correspondence
analysis results obtained for each pattern.
Chapter 8 discusses the attitudinal meanings expressed by the patterns studied in
each discipline. Attitudeis borrowed from appraisal theory (Martin & Rose,
2003, 2007; White, 2004), and my analysis follows this general approach insofar as it
distinguishes between subcategories of judgement, affect and appreciation in discourse. The
qualitative analysis presented in this chapter shows that there are clear disciplinary differences
6