Language Use and Disciplinarity: A Literature Review

Abstract

Disciplinary variation in language use is one of the focal topics in academic discourse research. This paper critically reviews extant literature studies on the close relationship between language use and disciplinarity, in an attempt to clarify the different perspectives, both theoretical and methodological, in exploring the discipline-specific nature of academic discourses. This paper points out that the previous studies mainly adopted a form-first approach to analyzing the lexico-grammatical features of disciplinary discourses and calls for more attention to the meanings, functions, and discourse-semantic patterns in discourses across disciplines by adopting a function-first approach.