What is most important: marking significance in academic discourse

The aim of this paper is to study how evaluation of importance can contribute to guiding the recognition of coherence relations. Focusing on expressions of importance and their textual and interactive functions in academic discourse, the paper explores how their frequencies, meanings and uses vary across disciplines. Using two corpora of journal articles from two “soft” disciplines: history and economics (2.5 m words each), the analysis starts with an overview of frequency data and moves on to the most frequent co-texts and collocates in which selected expressions are found, with a view to identifying collocations, multi-word markers, patterns of semantic preference and textual patterns. Expressions of importance are shown to contribute to establishing both lexico-semantic patterns and textual relations. Fronted adverbials and introductory framing clauses act as explicit discourse markers signalling emphasis in listing and general-specific patterns. Lexical choices and patterns are also related to the epistemology of the disciplines examined. The study suggests arguing for a multidimensional view of importance markers.