Nouns as nominal premodifiers in disciplinary research articles written by Filipino research writers: A cross-investigation

Nouns as nominal premodifiers (NNPs) are an underexplored area of research in L2 academic research writing. In this paper, I cross-investigated NNPs in published qualitative and quantitative research articles (RAs) written by Filipino research writers (FRWs) in Applied Linguistics (AL), Communication (COM), and Measurement and Evaluation (ME) using Biber et al.’s (2021) noun premodifiers framework, with the aid of Hernandez’s (2021) syntactic patterns. Major results revealed that NNPs dominantly co-occurred across disciplinary RA sub-registers, especially in quantitative ME RAs with the highest frequency of use of noun premodifiers. One-way ANOVA between groups with Post hoc Tukey HSD yielded no significant difference between noun premodifiers across disciplinary RAs. It was concluded that NNPs are widely significant, compressed, and implicit syntactic features of quantitative and qualitative disciplinary RAs. Regardless of disciplines, FRWs commonly use them to maintain economy of expression and compact packaging of information. Noun premodifiers make quantitative and qualitative disciplinary RAs as specialized sub-registers of academic research writing. Implications for research writing curricula, academic research writing instruction, and academic research journals are discussed.