Research article titles in applied linguistics

Abstract

With increasing diversification of research, a research article depends much upon the title to encapsulate its distinctive content. The present study aims to examine the syntactic structures and functions of research article titles in applied linguistics. Using a corpus of 796 titles from four journals that are included in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), we identified five syntactic structures, namely, compound, nominal, full-sentence, V-ing phrase, and prepositional phrase.