Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

A second limitation of the current research concerns the issue of representativeness.
No matter how carefully a corpus is constructed, it can only ever be representative of a
language or language variety to a very limited degree. In the case of the current research, it
must be acknowledged that if I had chosen a different set of journals and/or sub-disciplines,
this might have yielded different findings. However, this is true not just for the present study,
but for corpus research in general; representativeness is an ideal for the corpus designer, but in
reality it can only ever be approximated and not fully achieved. It could be argued that this is
somewhat less of a problem when the researcher is building a corpus designed to represent a
specialized discourse community such as those studied in this thesis. However, it must still be
acknowledged that 'applied linguistics' and 'business studies' are only generalizations, within
which there is a great deal of discursive variation. For example, both disciplines encompass
work by researchers who favour qualitative methods on the one hand, and researchers who
work with quantitative data on the other. In putting articles in these very different research
traditions together under the general labels of 'applied linguistics' and 'business studies', we
inevitably lose this level of detail. The only way to solve this problem, of course, is to make
finer distinctions at a sub-disciplinary level, and to build a much larger corpus which would
allow researchers to investigate and make claims about phraseological variation at this
micro-level. At the same time, however, this does not mean that the level of analysis chosen
for the present study is therefore invalid. On the contrary, one of the key findings of this
research has been that adjective patterns from different journals in applied linguistics tend to
cluster more closely with each other than they do with adjective patterns in business studies,
and vice versa. This being the case, the current research may be seen as providing empirical
justification for 'applied linguistics' and 'business studies' as general labels. In short, the issue
of representativeness is inextricably linked to questions of perspective and level of detail.
What the present study has done is provide a platform or basis for further work which could,
given a large and varied enough corpus, use exactly the same methodology to 'zoom in' and
study variation at more fine-grained levels of analysis.
The third limitation to be discussed here is that of the genre (i.e. RAs) treated in the
current study. In order to make a broader claim on the nature of discourse and culture of
applied linguistics and business studies, I may have to investigate other genres of the two
disciplines (e.g. review articles, textbooks, lectures, and so on). The amalgamation of the
findings from such various genres would more confidently present the real natures of
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