The present study aimed to examine the rhetorical structure of the discussion sections of English PhD dissertations authored by Iranian students in an EFL context, Indian ESL students and native (English speaking) PhD students at Applied Linguistics. To this end, 300 discussion sections were gathered from three contexts under study at the time frame of 2005 to 2020. Following Benson et al’s (1986) model, the researchers analyzed the discussion sections of the dissertations for both lexical and grammatical collocations and their different sub-classifications. The findings showed that the natives overused collocations in a significantly greater number in developing the PhD dissertations discussion section than those of EFL and ESL PhD students' dissertations. Moreover, despite variations, there were similarities between EFL and ESL PhD students' dissertations in terms of utilizing the sub-categories of collocations that can be considered as signs for standardization of academic writing by non-native speakers of English. The implications for researchers, teachers and students were discussed. تفاصيل المقالة

AbstractThis study investigates the collocations, as specific type of multiword sequences that frequently occur in the scientific writing of hard and soft disciplines based on Hoey's (2005) model. The study also extends the semantic prosody of collocations in general words across disciplines. To this end, the introduction sections of 1000 research articles (RAs) from two disciplines of soft and hard were gathered from disciplines of applied linguistics, sociology, and psychology under the category of soft science and from the majors of computer science, chemistry, physics and medicine under the category of hard science in order to find a relationship between these two types of RAs with differences in discipline and the authors’ use of collocations and their semantic prosody. In this study, function words containing articles were ignored that their rates and frequencies were higher than the content words, including specific and general words. The findings indicated that the collocates of general words expressed the positive, negative, and neutral senses and being in soft or hard science did not affect their semantic prosody. It means that the general words directly expressed the meaning they transferred to the reader, without the interference of the context. The results can result in collocation teaching, which is a popular genre of academic writing assigned across disciplines as well as in language-related courses. تفاصيل المقالة