Employment of Manifest Intertextuality in Geology and Applied Linguistics Ph.D. Theses: A Social Constructionist Perspective

Abstract

Manifest intertextuality is a concomitant of all academic discourse which is by necessity a creative blend of the words of the writer of the text and his predecessors, with the objective of integrating the current knowledge within the accredited facts of the discipline. Hence, this study explores the overall use of intertextual links in a corpus of (8) Geology and (8) Applied Linguistics Ph.D theses by Sudanese students. It was revealed that intertextuality employment is dictated by worldviews of disciplinary clusters (the hard-soft axis) and, thus, there were overt variations in the use of this feature between the two fields. The abundance of intertextual ties in Applied Linguistics and their dearth in Geology are due to the interdisciplinary nature of Applied Linguistics where dispersed strands have to be woven together into a coherent fabric to build a shared ethos between writer and reader. In contrast, the objectives, linear and cumulative nature of Geology largely omits such a need, as a great deal of procedural expertise is presupposed. Also, while Geology (a hard science) relied on human – evacuated, phenomena – prominent non -integral citations, Applied linguistics (a social science) tended to bring human agency to the limelight through integral citations. Also, nominalization in citation structures in Geology was meant to identify the terminological report –based nature of the field while there was an emphasis in Applied Linguistics on textual constructs and verbal processes.