Are Academics Becoming More Confused Than Before? A Diachronic Study of Confusion Markers in Applied Linguistics Research Articles

Abstract

Research articles generate and disseminate disciplinary knowledge in a specific field of study. They are expected to be objective, faceless, and free from expressions of emotion. However, linguistic expressions of confusion that signal authors’ affective attitude toward the propositional information are not uncommon in research articles. To determine and describe the dynamic changes that occurred in the deployment of such expressions in communicating disciplinary knowledge, this study examined linguistically expressed confusion in a corpus of 160 research articles in applied linguistics that were published in two periods separated by 30 years. Drawing on a frame-based analytical approach, this study revealed that time of publication was a robust predictor of academic authors’ overall use of confusion markers and the presence of some subcategories across the four frame elements of the Confusion frame. This study sheds new light on the possibilities of applying frame semantics to academic discourse analysis. More importantly, it has pedagogical implications in terms of helping raise the awareness of novice writers about the necessity of acquiring a time-sensitive repertoire of discursive resources to convey an appropriate authorial identity for effective academic communication.