Research Article titles in Applied Linguistics

With increasing diversification of research, a research article depends much upon the title to
encapsulate its distinctive content. The present study aims to examine the syntactic structures
and functions of research article titles in applied linguistics. Using a corpus of 888 titles from four
journals that are included in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), we identified five syntactic
structures, namely: compound, nominal, full-sentence, V-ing phrase, and prepositional phrase.
Of the five structures, compound titles, which enable the researcher to present dual foci of
studies, constitute more than half of occurrences , followed by nominal titles, which can
concisely summarize the essence of studies. Each of the other three structures accounts for a
very small percentage. A second-phase analysis was performed on the two constituent elements
of compound titles and on the heads and modifiers of the nominal titles. For the former, a total
of eleven categories were found, revealing a wide variety of crucial aspects of research in applied
linguistics, including mainly Topic-Scope, Topic-Method, Topic-Description, Topic-Source,
Metaphor-Topic, and Topic-Question. For the nominal titles, both discipline-specific and non
dicipline-specific heads were recognized. A majority of the discipline-specific heads are
compound nouns, and prepositional phrases are widely used as post-modifiers. The analysis
result provide useful information for the academic writing pendagogy.