Argumentation has remained under-researched in studies analyzing academic journal publications despite its importance in academic writing. This paper reports a study in which we investigated stereotypical argumentative trends, lexico-grammatical features, and interactional metadiscourse markers in 354 research article free-standing discussion sections from the journal of ESP over forty years. The field of ESP was chosen because of its maturity, which has given substance to a dynamic ground for arguments. We drew on the pragma-dialectical approach to analyzing argumentations in the corpus. Findings indicated that due to the argumentative nature of the discussion section, certain argumentative trends recurred more often. The analysis of the lexico-grammatical features and metadiscourse markers of the standpoints also showed patterns of variability over time. The study concludes that it is imperative to incorporate relevant facets from various argumentation models to construct a comprehensive argumentation theory and gain deeper insights into argumentation in academic writing.

尽管争论在学术写作中很重要，但在分析学术期刊出版物的研究中，争论仍未得到充分研究。本文报告了一项研究，在该研究中，我们调查了 40 多年来 ESP 杂志的 354 篇研究文章独立讨论部分中的陈规定型论证趋势、词汇语法特征和交互元话语标记。选择 ESP 领域是因为它的成熟度为争论提供了坚实的基础。我们利用语用辩证法来分析语料库中的论证。调查结果表明，由于讨论部分的争论性质，某些争论趋势更频繁地出现。对观点的词汇语法特征和元话语标记的分析也显示了随时间变化的模式。该研究的结论是，必须结合各种论证模型的相关方面来构建一个全面的论证理论，并对学术写作中的论证有更深入的了解。