ABSTRACT

This study examined the forms and functions of reformulation markers (RMs) in the three disciplines of philosophy, economics, and biology to see whether there is any disciplinary variation regarding these linguistic devices and their functions in essays written by undergraduate students. To this purpose, two corpora of university students’ essays were prepared using Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Essays and Sketch Engine. The functions of RMs were examined based on an established framework. Moreover, two further functions, clarification and exemplification, also emerged out of the data. The findings of this corpus-based study revealed that essays written in economics contained the highest frequency of RMs. As for the functions, the macro-function related to the interpretation of explicit meaning was the most common in all three disciplines. The baseline comparison revealed that reformulation is used almost similarly by the students for whom English is a native language and those for whom English is a second language: however, some remarkable differences existed with the way first-year students use RMs.

摘要

本研究考察了哲学、经济学和生物学三门学科中重构标记 (RM) 的形式和功能，以了解这些语言装置及其在本科生论文中的功能是否存在任何学科差异。为此，使用密歇根高中学生论文语料库和草图引擎准备了两个大学生论文语料库。根据既定框架检查了 RM 的功能。此外，数据中还出现了两个进一步的功能，澄清和例证。这项基于语料库的研究的结果表明，以经济学撰写的论文包含最高频率的 RM。就功能而言，与外显意义解释相关的宏观功能在三门学科中最为常见。