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

by Kristy Lesperance | Xchanges 11.2

Mathematics in Discourse Analysis

Hyland (2009) highlights some distinctive differences between contrastive “hard” and “soft” disciplines, citing the “continuum of academic knowledge” which progresses from the sciences (hard) at one end, to the humanities (soft) at the other (p. 9). He suggests that broad clusters of scientific disciplines, such as biology, engineering, and physics, together occupy one end of the spectrum, whereas the humanities and social sciences grouped together capture the other extremity. Owing to some fairly general epistemological, discursive, and practical similarities, these clusters of disciplines form the arguably stable and distinctive “hard” and “soft” categories referred to by numerous authors (such as Biglan, 1973; Hyland, 2007).

Becher (1994) originally had presented these “hard” and “soft” discipline categories by distinguishing between not two but four distinctive disciplinary groups: “hard pure,” “hard applied,” “soft pure” and “soft applied.” In relation to the focus of the present paper, it is interesting to note that within these groupings, physics is assigned to epitomize the “hard pure” category, whereas “education” is assigned to epitomize “soft applied” (p. 154). Although Becher incorporates mathematics into his discussion of the disciplinary differences in academic writing, it seems to be a discipline that is particularly difficult to categorize definitively.

It is difficult to find literature which explicitly examines the discursive style of mathematics, although Graves, Moghaddasi, and Hashim (2013) attempt to characterize some of the uniqueness of mathematics discourse. In their analysis of the organizational framework of academic research articles in pure and applied mathematics, Graves et al. show that mathematics articles tend to defy the traditional “hour-glass” structure defined by Swales (1990), transitioning from the Introduction directly into Results and omitting a distinctive Conclusion. They also make note of some distinctive discursive differences between the “pure” and “applied” sub-categories within mathematics, which suggests a potential for additional variation to be discovered between mathematics research articles on the basis of intended audience.

This is greatly elaborated upon by Van Dijk (2006), who asserts that contexts “directly interfere in the mental processes of discourse production and comprehension” (p. 163) in his socio-cognitive approach to the incorporation of context into textual analysis. Audience-sensitivity is also discussed by Hyland (2007) in relation to the use of exemplification and reformulation in academic research articles. He explains the use of “code glosses” as a small gesture from authors to their intended audience, which creates “coherent, reader-friendly prose” (p. 266). Cuenca and Bach (2007) appear to agree, describing reformulation as beneficial to the author-reader relationship, insofar as it strengthens both a reader’s comprehension of an idea and the idea’s rhetorical force by increasing its intelligibility.

I completed the present analysis to combine the ideas presented in Hyland (2007) and in Graves et al. (2013), in order to examine the frequency and particularity of exemplification and reformulation in academic discourse about geometry. In sum, I would argue that although code gloss use may vary according to discipline, it can also vary within disciplines according to intended audience. Therefore, greater audience awareness may be of use to students seeking to gain acceptance into their chosen particular niches, within the more broad fields of research such as mathematics.