| Based on a self-built 2, 774, 166 word corpus of three-discipline English academic articles, this paper explores the disciplinary variations in the frequencies and preferred uses of chunks in terms of discourse function, i.e. research-oriented chunks, text-oriented chunks, and participant-oriented chunks. The findings indicate that research-oriented chunks occupy the highest proportion of all the chunks in academic articles, text-oriented chunks the next, participant-oriented chunks the lowest. It is also found that there are significant disciplinary differences in chunk distribution, which, to be specific, include the following aspects: firstly, research-oriented chunks take up more than half of all the chunks in the academic articles of engineering discipline, while in the disciplines of humanities and social sciences, the proportion of text-oriented chunks is higher than that of research-oriented chunks furthermore, participant-oriented chunks account for the highest proportion in linguistics, the discipline of economics, business and management the next, engineering discipline the lowest. The characteristics of disciplinary chunk distribution are closely related to research objects, methods, paradigms and ways of presentation across disciplines. The corpus-based investigation of English academic chunks across disciplines can help enhance learners' English academic writing skills and provide reference resources for the teaching of EAP and ESP. |