Constructing the global from the local: On the FSP status of keywords in academic discourse

Attaching a set of keywords has become a norm, or a convention at least, in most academic publications. Surprisingly, these prominent items, encoding the Global Theme of academic discourse and fulfilling numerous other functions, have yet to receive adequate linguistic attention. In syntactic terms they tend to be rather uniform, realized mostly by isolated nouns or by noun phrases (Pípalová 2017). This paper seeks to explore their in-text use (iteration) and FSP standing in authentic research articles. The work, which is part of a larger study, is framed in terms of two objectives. Firstly, it looks at varying frequencies of keyword items and at their distribution across the diverse parts of research articles. Secondly, examining both their explicit and implicit realizations, the paper strives to verify their thematic status in individual sentences. Established on a specialized corpus of recent academic articles drawn from peer-reviewed international journals, the paper attempts to balance quantitative and qualitative research and to correlate the operation of keywords at micro- and macrotextual levels. The results of the study should enrich FSP research and may also have practical relevance for Academic writing courses.