This volume explores an important aspect of researchon academic discourse and disciplinary culture, withexamples given from corpus-assisted discourseanalysis. The analysis proceeds through a detailedquantitative and qualitative analysis of the use oflanguage patterns in two large corpora of authentictexts. The empirical focus of the study will be ontwo 'soft-applied' disciplines (Becher & Trowler,2001), Applied Linguistics and Business Studies, asrepresented by two corpora of research articles drawnfrom 16 leading journals in each field. Comparison ofthe results for each corpus shows that...