Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

ased on corpus-based quantitative (viz. statistical-based) and qualitative (viz.
discourse-based) analyses respectively, and found that each analysis produced complementary
but distinct perspectives on these data.
10.3. Disciplinary cultures and values of two disciplines
The disciplinary cultures of applied linguistics and business studies are, in some degree,
delineated from the disciplinary values inscribed in the pattern A DJ PR EP N. Although it
may seem to be too broad to suggest the following values as peculiarities of each discipline,
they are empirical facts about the meanings expressed by the variant forms of this pattern as it
occurs in my corpora. That is, the following values are what I see through the investigation of
this study.
Based on the analyses in the current study, applied linguistics emerges as a
humanistic discipline which is characterized by an emphasis on what I have termed animacy
(i.e. human agency and dynamic processes), causation (i.e. causal links between phenomena),
generalization (i.e. drawing general conclusions from specific exemplars), emotionality (i.e.
attitudes towards research findings), caution (i.e. the tendency to make hedged knowledge
claims), neutrality (i.e. the adoption of an objectively scientific textual voice), past
information (i.e. an interest in historical contexts and in how current research relates to
previous information), and attributes (i.e. the properties of things). On the other hand, the
picture of business studies that emerges from my analysis is of a discipline that construes the
world in more mechanistic and dehumanized terms, and which is characterized by an
emphasis on what I have termed inanimacy (i.e. static structures and states of affairs), effect
(i.e. a greater concern with outcomes than with causes), particularization (i.e. a focus on
individual cases and a reluctance to draw general conclusions from specific exemplars),
emotionlessness (i.e. an absence of interest in the affective states of research subjects and a
, assertiveness
(i.e. the tendency to express claims in strong and unhedged forms), equality (i.e. the adoption
of an egalitarian textual voice), current information (i.e. a comparative lack of interest in
historical context-and-), and connections
(i.e. an interest in taxonomic relationships between things). Figure 12.1 below summarizes the
disciplinary cultures and values of each discipline extracted from the behaviour of the pattern
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