Applying (non)head-movement mechanism to study topic sentences in applied linguistics research articles

Abstract

Writing a topic sentence is difficult, as a variety of linguistic knowledge is required to represent the main idea of the whole paragraph. This study applies the mechanism of A-movement in generative syntax to observe syntactic structures, semantic denotations and pragmatic aspects of topic sentences in applied linguistics research articles. The data were collected from System and LEARN, which are SCOPUS database indexed in Q1 and Q2, respectively. A sample of 303 topic sentences calculated via Yamane sample size, was collected to be studied. The data analysis was adapted from Radford’s (2009, 2020) A-movement mechanism. The results show that System applies the mechanism of A-movement more than LEARN. The discussion reveals that pragmatic discourse of given and new information is applied in System. Also, the semantic denotations of subjectivity, referring to evaluating certain entities, is commonly applied in System. Despite having differences, the similarities between the two publications are their syntactic structures. This study contributes to journals of applied linguistics to develop themselves in order to reach the SCOPUS Q1 database in the future. With over three years of study in this field, the author expects that this study will contribute some knowledge to other applied linguistics researchers, editors and EFL learners.

Keywords: A-movement, topic sentences, applied linguistics, SCOPUS databases.

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