Tracking the changing patterns of graphic data commentary in economics research articles over time: A local grammar study

This paper adopts a local grammar approach to explore how the semantic patterns of the discourse act of graphic data commentary in economics research articles have changed over the recent three decades. Based on the comparable corpora of research articles of economics from three time periods (i.e. 1990-1999, 2000–2009, and 2010–2019), we extracted instances of graphic data commentary and performed local grammar analyses to obtain three groups of semantic patterns (i.e. the local grammar patterns). By comparing the frequency distributions of these patterns across the corpora, we find that over the 30 years graphic data commentary has changed to become more concise, interactive, and interpretive. Behind these changes, we argue that the changing social-cultural factors and the disciplinary epistemology of economics may have driven economists to strategically modify the semantic patterns of graphic data commentary. This study also discusses the pedagogical value of the changing patterns of graphic data commentary for current local grammar based EAP teaching.