“Strengthening Connections with the Audience: Reformation and Exemplification in Mathematics Research Articles”

by Kristy Lesperance | Xchanges 11.2

Results & Discussions

Overview

The articles in the present corpus divided into roughly 11,300 words on average per theory article, and 8,600 words per education article. Adapting Hyland’s (2007) approach, the frequency of target word occurrences was calculated per 10,000 words for clarity, since code gloss use tended to be overall lower in frequency both in comparison to Hyland’s findings as well as to other discursive features of academic articles.

In general, there were nearly 1,200 code gloss indicators found in my corpus, with roughly 41 occurrences of code gloss markers per article. On average, theory articles contained 27 reformulation markers each and 16 exemplification markers. In contrast, education articles used only 16 reformulation markers on average and 22 exemplification markers. This is a fairly notable variation from Hyland’s analysis which found, in general, only about 25 occurrences of code glosses per paper.

Also contrary to Hyland’s findings that 67 percent of all code gloss markers occurred within the articles of softer fields, in the present study roughly 61 percent of all code gloss markers appeared in theory (hard) articles. The present study also found an almost identical division between exemplification and reformulation in the corpus as a whole, differing from Hyland’s findings that exemplification was preferred by 16 percent overall when compared to reformulation.

Code gloss markers in theory articles divided into roughly 37 percent indicating exemplification and 63 percent indicating reformulation, with a total frequency of about 38 instances per 10,000 words. In comparison to Hyland’s analysis, which found that roughly 66 percent of all reformulation instances occurred within articles from harder disciplines, the present analysis found roughly only 56 percent of all reformulation markers occurred within theory articles. Thus, although partially aligning with Hyland’s findings, these results suggest a more modest disparity between code gloss use in hard and soft fields.

In contrast, education articles showed a slightly higher frequency of code gloss markers at around 45 per 10,000 words, dividing into roughly 58 percent exemplification and 42 percent reformulation. Similar to Hyland’s findings, a notable proportion of exemplification indicators were found in education (a softer knowledge field); however, Hyland notes that over 80 percent of uses occurred in the softer articles of his corpus, whereas in the present analysis, only 65 percent of uses were found in education.

Reformulation — Comparisons Across Sub-Disciplines

Of the 11 targeted indicators of reformulation, theory articles tended to use a greater number of reformulation markers than exemplification markers, and a greater amount of reformulation when compared to education articles — roughly 26 percent more frequently. Both theory and education articles tended to use the same four markers about 75 percent of the time (in particular, or, i.e., and that is).

The use of in particular was especially salient within theory articles, having the highest frequency at 5.6 instances per 10,000 words. Other commonly used indicators were i.e., with 4.2 occurrences per 10,000 words, and that is, with 3.3 occurrences. Education articles showed a preference for the same markers, albeit with slightly lower frequency. A notable difference is the use of or. In my corpus, both the theory and education articles used this word with greater frequency than the 3.6 percent found in Hyland’s corpus, amounting to 13 percent of all code gloss markers in the present corpus.