Semantic and Syntactic Analysis of Verb in Introduction of Research Article

Academic writing has attracted the attention of numerous researchers in the last two decades. Much of this attention has been devoted to genre of research article and its sections. One of the research article sections is introduction which has become an important area of study. Introduction has been investigated for different linguistic features. Among the linguistic features that received little attention is verb. Thus, this study aims to study the semantic and syntactic features of verbs used in introduction section of Applied Linguistics research articles published in Iranian local and ISI international journals. A corpus of 20 research article introductions was used. The introductions were extracted from two journals; “journal of research in Applied Linguistics” as a local journal and “English for Specific Purposes” as a high-impact international journal. The corpus was analyzed for syntactic features (tense, aspect and voice) and semantic meaning of verbs. The findings showed that common tenses are present and past rather than future in both group of introductions. In introductions published in international journal, present tense is used greater compared with introductions published in local journal while past tense is used two times greater in introductions published in local journal. In relation to aspect of verbs, in both groups of introductions, simple aspect is common but greater in introductions published in local journal. Perfect aspect is used greater in introductions published in international journal. Concerning voice, active voice is predominant in both groups of introductions. Semantically, verbs with mental, activity, communication and existence meanings are common in both groups of introductions. The differences between two groups of introductions concerning semantic meaning of verbs are not different significantly. The findings of this study could help novice writers in Applied Linguistics to keep conscious while using verbs in writing research article introduction.