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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. 183–204

Lexical bundles as reflections of disciplinary norms in Spanish and English literary criticism, history, and psychology research

| Georgia State University
| Georgia State University

While corpus studies on academic writing have improved instructional materials for writing in the hard sciences, humanities and social sciences world language writing pedagogy remains open to development. In the interest of data-driven Spanish for academic purposes curricula, using English and Spanish corpora of psychology, history and literary criticism articles, we analyzed nouns occurring in sentence-subject position in 100 randomly-sampled sentences. In both languages, psychology had significantly more epistemic, and fewer phenomenal, sentence subject nouns than the other two fields. We extended our analysis to lexical bundles containing Spanish-English equivalent noun phrases in sentence-subject position which occurred significantly more often in psychology in both languages. The results are discussed in terms of scientific and humanities writing pedagogy for both languages.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Review of related literature
    • 2.1LBs and their connection to argumentation in disciplines
    • 2.2Lexicogrammatical features and their connection to argumentation
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Corpus
      • 3.1.1History
      • 3.1.2Literary criticism
      • 3.1.3Psychology
    • 3.2LB identification
    • 3.3Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Preliminary study: Replicating MacDonald’s study of sentence subjects
    • 4.2Main study: Subcorpus-level differences at the formulaic language level
      • 4.2.1Cross-linguistic, intra-disciplinary variation
      • 4.2.2Cross-linguistic and disciplinary variation
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1“Facts”: The most frequent epistemic bundles in all disciplines
    • 5.2Further expressions of epistemicity in psychology writing
    • 5.3Equivalent phenomenal bundles in all disciplines
    • 5.4History-specific phenomenal bundles
    • 5.5Psychology-specific phenomenal bundles
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 20 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.95.08lak
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