Whiteside, Karin (2016) A corpus-driven investigation into the semantic patterning of grammatical keywords in undergraduate History and PIR (Politics & International Relations) essays. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis involves a comparative lexico-grammatical analysis of third-year student writing belonging to the Essay genre family (Nesi and Gardner, 2012) in two disciplines, History and PIR (Politics and International Relations), from two UK higher educational institutions. The project adopts a corpus-driven approach which was developed by Groom (2007) in his analysis of professional academic writing in Literature and History: statistically significant grammatical words are identified using a keyness analysis, and the phraseological patterning around these grammatical keywords is then qualitatively analysed and phraseologies are categorised according to their semantic purposes. In the project five grammatical keywords - of, and, that, as and this - were analysed across four sub-corpora each consisting of student writing from one of the two disciplines at one of the two institutions. It was found that there were more similarities than there were variations in the semantic patterning of grammatical keywords across the four disciplinary/institutional sub-corpora, and that these similarities could to a large extent be explained in terms of the shared features of student Humanities and Social Sciences writing (Durrant, 2015). The variations that occurred fell along disciplinary rather than institutional lines and it is argued that, with regards to both similarities and differences, in the case of these two disciplines at the two target institutions, discipline seems to override institution as an influence at lexico-grammatical level on the nature of student academic writing. It is also argued that Groom’s (2007) approach is an extremely useful one to take in analysis of student writing as it uncovers lexico-grammatical features which occur extremely regularly within student texts and thus, from a pedagogical perspective, are of high value in terms of how much of the text they ‘operationalize’ (Bruce, 2011, p. 6).

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	English language -- Discourse analysis, Linguistic analysis (Linguistics), Lexicology, Academic writing -- Research, History -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- Great Britain, Political science -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- Great Britain
Official Date:	July 2016
Dates:	Date Event July 2016 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Centre for Applied Linguistics
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Wharton, Sue ; MacDonald, Malcolm N.
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	xiii, 283 leaves : illustrations, charts
Language:	eng

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