Towards a corpus-based approach to diachronic analysis of lexical diversity and density of research article abstracts in the field of translation studies

Diachronic patterns of lexical diversity and density in research article (RA) abstracts have garnered increasing scholarly attention in recent years, with findings generally pointing to an upward trend in the two metrics across various journals. However, despite the examination of a broad spectrum of disciplines, translation studies (TS) has remained underexplored in this line of research. Furthermore, most of extant studies fell short of in-depth explanations for observed trends but only provide rough analyses. This study investigates the diachronic trends in lexical diversity and density of RA abstracts published over the past 35 years in 12 prestigious TS journals, and further inquires into the driving forces behind the trends. The results reveal a pronounced upward trajectory in both lexical metrics across the examined period. The trend can be attributed to the rising frequency of nouns and adjectives, which is fundamentally driven by disciplinary development including theoretical evolution, diversification of research objects as well as prevalence of empirical methodologies.