1 Introduction

Journal articles are an important platform for researchers to exchange scientific knowledge. Traditionally, they should maintain objectivity and rationality, but in practice, there are often "interest" markers that express the author's emotional evaluation. These markers belong to interactive meta discourse attitude markers and play an important role in promoting knowledge growth. Existing research has paid insufficient attention to the temporal changes in attitude markers, especially the analysis of specific markers such as "interest" markers. This study is based on the theory of frame semantics and conducts a longitudinal examination of the use of "interest" markers in international journal articles in applied linguistics. It analyzes the correlation between changes in social and academic contexts and the use of interest markers, and explores their role in disciplinary knowledge construction.

Framework Semantics and Academic Discourse Analysis

Frame semantics regards frames as a schematic representation used to understand events, situations, or relationships. Framework elements are divided into core and non core, with the former being an essential component of the framework and the latter possibly shared by different frameworks. FrameNet makes implicit background knowledge and conceptual structure explicit by describing the graphical semantic scenarios that vocabulary inference relies on. Framework semantics emphasizes that framework knowledge is a context dependent cognitive structure derived from embodied experiences of cultural conventions. The application of this theory in academic discourse analysis is relatively limited. This study adopts Wang U0026 Hu's (2022) semantic analysis framework for "interest" markers to examine the changes in the use of "interest" markers in international journal articles in applied linguistics, in order to reveal the relationship between emotional evaluation language, cognition, social context changes, and disciplinary knowledge construction.

3 Research Methods

Introduced research methods, including the construction of corpora and the application of analytical frameworks. Researchers have established a corpus of international journals in applied linguistics, consisting of 160 papers and approximately 1 million word symbols, covering two time periods: 1989-1993 and 2019-2023. Four top English academic journals were selected, and 20 papers were randomly selected from each journal in two time periods. The corpus has removed non textual information such as titles and abstracts. The study adopts the "interest" tagging semantic analysis framework proposed by Wang U0026 Hu (2022), which includes four framework elements: trigger type, degree, elaboration, and experiencer, further subdivided into 15 subcategories. To ensure coding accuracy, two coders jointly encoded 30% of the corpus, resulting in high consistency. Encoding disputes are resolved through negotiation. The author independently completed the encoding of the remaining corpus. To analyze the temporal changes of the "interest" marker, binary logistic regression analysis was used, with publication time as the predictor variable and recent period as the reference value. Multiple statistical calculations were performed on the subcategories, and Bonferroni correction was used to avoid Type II errors.

4 Research Results and Discussion

The use of "interest" markers in international journals of applied linguistics has increased by 2.52 times in recent years (2019-2023) compared to earlier periods (1989-1993), indicating that scholars are more inclined to use "interest" markers to express emotional evaluations, construct disciplinary knowledge, and engage in academic exchanges. This growth trend is consistent with the increasing use of positive emotional evaluation resources in academic texts, reflecting the enhanced interpersonal interaction and dialogue in academic discourse. In the temporal changes of subcategories in the "interest" tagging framework, recent scholars are more likely to evaluate current or existing research as "interesting", use reinforcement words to highlight the confidence and certainty of emotional evaluation, explain why scientific facts trigger interest, and juxtapose self mention with the "interest" tag to clarify oneself as an emotional experiencer. These changes are related to the changes in academic context, the trend of disciplinary specialization, the emergence of emerging disciplines, interdisciplinary integration, and the trend of open science in the world. The author needs to consider the knowledge structure or background of potential readers to enhance the persuasiveness of the argument and establish a collaborative and consistent interpersonal relationship with readers.

5 Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the 30-year changes in the use of "interest" markers in international journals of applied linguistics from the perspective of frame semantics, reflecting the increasing academic and cultural competition, as well as the trend towards disciplinary specialization and dispersed readership. The research has implications for academic English teaching in Chinese universities, and it is recommended that teachers guide students to pay attention to micro language resources, such as the use of emotional markers, in order to build an authoritative argumentative identity and legitimize knowledge claims, and integrate them into the disciplinary community. At the same time, teachers should incorporate rhetorical strategies of academic discourse into their teaching, help students acquire the language/style characteristics of subject discourse communities, improve their understanding of the interpersonal meaning of emotional evaluation resources in academic English writing, enhance contextual awareness and sensitivity to the dynamic evolution of emotional evaluation resource use.