A comparative study of intensity markers in engineering and applied linguistics

Abstract

Writers use intensity markers as one of strategies in order to negotiate their claims and to make their writings persuasive and credible. This study is an attempt to examine the type, frequency, and functions of intensity markers in research articles of two disciplines of Applied Linguistics and Electrical Engineering by analyzing surface linguistic features. Based on a corpus of forty research articles, the overall rhetorical and categorical distribution of intensity markers were calculated across two rhetorical sections of Abstract and Conclusion of research articles. The results indicates that the overall distribution of intensity markers in Applied Linguistics articles is higher than Electrical Engineering ones. These findings may have some implications for the teaching of academic writing to EFL students.