Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

Most of these journals are also registered in Journal Citation Reports (JCR), indicating that
they are of high academic quality and have an impact on their academic fields. Some journals
in Table 5.1 below have high 5-year impact factor scores (5YIF), but some others are not
registered in JCR at all. In these cases, I checked with experts in these fields to ensure that
these journals are nevertheless internationally recognised and can be seen as representative of
each sub-discipline of the two disciplines. 23 This is largely because such journals (i.e.
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Language Testing, Quarterly Journal of Business
and Economics, Business and Strategy, and Journal of Business Strategy) tend to be in
comparatively new subfields .
To compile each corpus of applied linguistics and business studies, the articles were
collected in their electronic version. The retrieved data are restricted to true RAs in the
designated journals; that is, editorials, prefaces, review articles, book reviews and editors
notes were not included.
much as possible, irrelevant features in articles were commonly removed, including
Explanatory and topic-focused footnotes and endnotes in the papers were considered to be the
work and were thereby included in the corpus.
I extracted data from articles in HTML or PDF format by copying them and pasting
them into plain text files. In particular, I preserved the data in each text file in the Unicode
(UTF-8) format since some concordancers cannot handle other formats; Unicode is the most
versatile text format for any corpus concordance program. When extracting language data
from journal articles, another point must be carefully noted: erasing the line feed in each data.
For instance, data from most articles in the PDF format include the unseen line feed at the end
of each line (not at the end of sentence). Let us consider the following figure:
A general reference corpus includes academic texts, newspaper and literature as significant
parts. For example, Baby-BNC, a 4 million word corpus, is compiled from 4 sections: written
academic prose; written fiction; written newspaper and spoken demographic; each section is about
one million running words. Thus, for written language texts, these can be divided into three broad
categories: academic, newspaper and literature.
Figure 5.1. Line feeds
23 I would like to thank the specialist informants who reviewed my selection of journals for the two disciplines.
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