Exploring disciplinary authors’ conflict negotiation in published research article discussions

Abstract

Research article (RA) discussions require authors to underline new research findings through negotiating conflict, known as academic conflict (AC), with a specific strand of literature. However, AC has been either inadequately represented in particular disciplines, or left unnoticed across disciplines in academic writing research. This study follows a cross-disciplinary perspective to examine and compare AC negotiation in published medical and applied linguistics RA discussions based on Hunston’s framework. A specialised corpus consisting of 60 RAs, 30 from each discipline, from prestigious journals was screened for AC frequency and recurrent features through manual rhetorical analysis. The findings revealed little variation in overall AC realisation across the two disciplines. In terms of AC components, medical RAs included frequent proposed claims and recurrent conflict resolution features, indicating authors’ tendency to overuse self-interpretations in arguing against previous claims. By contrast, applied linguistics authors relied more on opposed claim components to discuss new findings and resolve research tensions. These findings help enrich our understanding of AC realisations across discipline RAs, which in turn might offer helpful insights into more proportionate academic writing practice and pedagogy.