Macrophenomenon: Patterns of Interactive Clause Expansion in the Methodology Section of Applied Linguistics Research Articles

Experienced writers employ heterogeneous structures in their composition of research articles to align with the purpose of the writing and the audience (Jagaiah et al., 2020).This heterogeneity, however, is not unsystematic.This study uses a Systemic Functional Linguistic view of the tactic and logico-semantic systems to reveal the interactive information structure of clause expansion.The corpus of the present study consisted of 160 methodology sections of empirical articles from four top-tier applied linguistics ISI journals published from 2016 to 2022 in two-year regular intervals.By conducting quantitative and qualitative analyses on the data, we obtained valuable perspectives on the interactive function of diverse clause types, namely clause simplex and paratactic and hypotactic clause complexes in the analyzed corpus.The theoretical implications of these empirical findings underscore the inherent nature of language as a dynamic system wherein the authors' informed decision on the clause type is registered through the descriptive, reactive, proactive, narrative, and accentuating information structure in the ongoing discourse.