History v. marketing

We present the findings of an introductory study of keywords across two disciplines, i.e. history and marketing, focusing on terms that bring insights into disciplinary epistemology. The study relies on two comparable corpora (2.5 million words each) comprised of history and marketing research articles respectively. We comparatively investigate the collocational patterns of keywords, focussing in particular on one of their most frequent collocates i.e. reporting verbs. Our quantitative and qualitative keyword analysis points to differing collocations for history and marketing, but it validates the assumption that keywords may serve as effective clues to the epistemology of a discipline with a view to its agentive subjects, objects and research procedures defining the construction of knowledge in specific contexts.