A corpus-driven investigation into the semantic patterning of grammatical keywords in undergraduate History and PIR (Politics & International Relations) essays
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,
Whiteside, Karin
P Philology. Linguistics
A corpus-driven investigation into the semantic patterning of grammatical keywords in undergraduate History and PIR (Politics & International Relations) essays. 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,
corpus_driven investigation semantic pattern grammatical keywords undergraduate history politics international_relations essay involves comparative lexico_grammatical analysis third year student_write belong essay genre family discipline history politics international_relations high educational_institution project adopt corpus_driven developed analysis professional academic_write literature history statistically_significant grammatical word identify use analysis phraseological pattern around grammatical keywords qualitatively analysed phraseology categorise accord semantic purpose project grammatical keywords analyse across_four sub corpora consist student_write discipline institution find similarity variation semantic pattern grammatical keywords across_four disciplinary institutional sub corpora similarity could large_extent explain_term share_feature student social_sciences write