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Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing: Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise
Edited by Ute Römer-Barron, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 95] 2020
► pp. 137–168

Combining rhetorical move analysis with multi-dimensional analysis

Research writing across disciplines

| Iowa State University
| Iowa State University
| University of North Texas

We carry out comprehensive form–function mapping in Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion/Conclusion – structured research articles across 30 academic disciplines by merging move analysis (revealing rhetorical structure) and multi-dimensional (MD) analysis (modeling patterns of linguistic variation). These two analytic paradigms converge to map the communicative functions of text segments with patterns of functional linguistic variation, but the juxtaposition of these two approaches requires adaptations to the traditional MD methodology. The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide a detailed account of the methodological complexities of combining MD analysis and move analysis. We briefly present the results of the MD analysis, acknowledging that further methodological adjustments may be needed to arrive at an optimal multi-dimensional description of moves.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Move analysis
    • 1.2Investigating the linguistic characteristics of moves
    • 1.3Multi-dimensional analyses of moves
  • 2.The ISURA corpus: Design, compilation, and move annotation
    • 2.1Design and compilation
    • 2.2Development of the IMRD/C move/step framework
    • 2.3Annotating the ISURA corpus for moves and steps
  • 3.Applying MD analysis to the move-annotated ISURA corpus: Methods
    • 3.1Preparing the move-annotated ISURA corpus for analysis: Text segmentation and tagging
    • 3.2Obtaining rates of occurrence for linguistic features: Adapting to a specialized domain and short texts
    • 3.3Conducting the statistical analyses
    • 3.4Calculating dimension scores and interpreting dimensions
  • 4.Dimensions of variation across rhetorical moves
    • 4.1Dimension 1: Interpretation and expansion vs. simple reportage
    • 4.2Dimension 2: Abstraction / Overt empiricism
    • 4.3Dimension 3: Procedural narration
    • 4.4Dimension 4: Interpreting results vs. informational density
  • 5.Applying and evaluating the MD analysis of moves
    • 5.1Evaluation of the dimensions and process
    • 5.2Implications and applications
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 20 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.95.06gra
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