An Investiagtion of Idioms in Applied Linguistics Research Articles: A Corpus-driven Study

Idioms, commonly considered to be a figure of informal, colorful, and entertaining language, are supposed not to lend themselves to formal discourses. However, idioms have been recently found to be employed in formal communications and academic discourse. This study strives to identify idioms in a corpus of 409122 words of 50 randomly selected Applied Linguistics papers. Moreover, the study aims to analyze different aspects of English idiom usage along with the pragmatic functions they perform in Applied Linguistics research articles. Furthermore, a comparison was made between the employment of English idioms and their functions in the articles written by native English-speaking and those of native Persian-speaking authors. Results of descriptive statistics indicated that English –speaking writers significantly used more idiomatic expressions in their research articles. Six pragmatic functions fulfilled by idioms in research articles were also extracted. Two lists of the most frequently used idioms in research articles were compiled. The six pragmatic functions include evaluative, informational, modalizing, emphatic, organizational, and cross-functioning. By studying and providing the most frequent academic idioms in Applied Linguistics research articles, the findings of this study can be useful for the EFL writing instructors, Applied Linguistics graduate and post graduate students, and teaching materials developers.