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