Signaling Nouns in English and Persian: A Contrastive Study

This study presents a comparison and description of a major class of vocabulary, signaling nouns, in English and Persian which have important discourse function in establishing links across and within clauses. This class of noun is prevalent in academic discourse. The comparison is based on three corpuses, Native English texts, Non native English, Native Persian texts. Signaling nouns in three corpora were identified in different stages. The data collected was analyzed and clarified on the basis of categories, adopted from Flowerdew (2004). The result showed that there are significant differences between Non-native English linguistics texts and Native English linguistics texts and also native Persian linguistics texts in the use and kind of signaling nouns. It was revealed that English writers used signaling nouns more than non-native English writers. And also non-native English writers used signaling nouns more than Persian writers. The description provides a framework which is likely to be of value to materials writers and teachers and learners.