Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

esearch an observation that leads us on to our next sub-section.
10.3.7. Past Information vs. Current Information
Applied linguistics RAs incorporate substantial amounts of antecedent information from
secondary sources such as journal articles, books, and websites. In business studies, however,
researchers are much less likely to contextualize their own research in this way; instead, they
prefer to attempt to gain information from people or organizations directly, and seem to place
a much higher value on information produced at the current time. In this respect, business
studies seems to be more concerned to connect research world of business than is
the case in applied linguistics -driven
rationale. In other words, applied linguistics is likely to research things by consulting what
was found in the past, whereas business studies is likely to speculate about the future by
drawing on what happens now.
10.3.8. Attribute vs. Connection
As in the investigation of the second theme relation in Chapter 9, there are two kinds of
functional relations expressed by the pattern A DJ PR EP Nconnection and attribute.
Patterns in the connection group consistently show higher figures for business studies than
applied linguistics. Conversely, patterns in the attribute group are likely to show higher
figures for applied linguistics than business studies. These observations indicate that applied
linguistics is more concerned with relationships that exist within a research object than is the
case in business studies. That is, applied linguists tend to look at internally observable things,
whilst business studies is more interested in observing and analysing the external links of a
research objectlooking at externally observable things. For instance, in one of the attribute
relations, REPRESENTATIVENESS, both disciplines are concerned with the validity of the
research method or representation, but the act of generalization (e.g. how and why a sample is
representative of its parent population) is more salient in applied linguistics than it is in
business studies (although such relationships are more varied in business studies than they are
in applied linguistics). Such relations tend to be foregrounded as a prerequisite to research in
applied linguistics whereas they tend to be backgrounded as the outcome of research in
business studies.
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