Qualitative Adjectives in Education Research Articles: The Case of Lifelong Learning and Adult Education

Language is often the determining factor in authors’ success in publishing their papers. Among various language features authors utilize is adjectives. There is a lack of consensus about their use in academic writing. This study investigated qualitative adjective use in research articles in one sub-discipline of educational sciences. The corpus was comprised of 30 journal articles. Online software was used to describe the adjective profile. A scheme was borrowed from the literature to classify adjectives according to their semantic use. Results showed that adjectives accounted for 7.9% of the corpus. A significant number of adjectives belonged to the Academic Words List and the Off-list Words (50.9%). Results also showed that the Abstract included the biggest percentage of adjectives (10.4%), which was followed by the Conclusion and Recommendations (8.9%) and the Introduction and Literature Review (8.8%). Adjectives occurred in Methods and Results less frequently. The most common semantic use of adjectives was related to the sub-domain of descriptors. Evaluative adjectives were also used frequently. The second sub-domain of classifiers included topical (8.3%) and relational adjectives (2.4%). Results are discussed and recommendations are made future studies.