The Rhetorical Strategies to Create Incremental Innovation in Applied Linguistics Research Articles

Abstract

Rhetorical studies within research articles have received a
growing linguists' concern worldwide. However, studies
on this significant area to create incremental innovation
are hardly found, while addressing this need may
significantly contribute not only to article authors but
also significance for journal gatekeepers to evaluate what
extent an under-reviewed paper contains a contribution
to knowledge development. Understanding this need has
attracted the authors to conduct the present study by
investigating rhetorical strategies used by article authors
to create incremental innovation in their research articles
and analyzing linguistic features used to create
innovation for their current research. To address these
purposes, the present study analyzed 37 research article
introductions (RAIs) that contain incremental innovation
using a newly designed framework and linguistic feature
approaches from previous studies. The results showed
three rhetorical strategies to create incremental
innovation in research articles, but of these three, most
authors tend to employ Strategy 2, Presenting the existing
knowledge – and then – improving it in the present
study, more than the other two strategies. Then, to realize
incremental innovation, they employed six linguistic
features, but of these six, two features (connective
adverbs and phrases denoting examining a particular
issue) appeared to be the most dominant in the present
data