Intertextuality in academic writing: citation in soft and hard sciences

Based on a corpus analysis of 72 research articles, this thesis examines citation practices in four academic disciplines, two soft (linguistics and art history) and two hard (biology and astronomy). The first part provides quantitative results for the usage of two basic types, integral and non-integral citation. The non-integral type is preferred mainly in biology (91%), whereas astronomy and linguistics do not show such strong preference. In art history, both types are used with similar frequencies. The second part is focused on integral citation and examines instances of its sub-types (verb-controlling, naming and non-citation). The third part analyses the distribution of citations in the individual sections of research articles which shows to be dependent on the structural organization of the article. In general, two tendencies have been found: in articles with IMRD structure (biology and linguistics), citations occur mainly in the introduction and discussion. In astronomy and art history, citations are almost evenly distributed across the text. The last part of this thesis is focused on reporting verbs and their semantic classification (research, cognitive and discourse acts). Astronomy shows strong preference for research acts verbs, whilst biology employs this type only slightly more often..