Corpora and academic writing

Research articles represent a major form of academic discourse and are known to vary based on genre and discipline. Although numerous studies have been conducted to describe and explain these variations, few of them have used quantitative methods. However, text statistics is particularly well developed in France, and the methods and tools developed would be very useful for ESP and EAP teachers and corpus linguists. The present chapter offers an overview of the main methods that have been developed, and combines qualitative and text-statistics approaches to examine variation between the academic fields of biology and linguistics, two disciplines that differ widely with respect to their experimental approaches, methodology, and intellectual communities and history. Keywords: academic genres; corpus linguistics; text statistics