| The study was designed to determine whether there are characteristic distributions of cohesive ties within writings from various academic disciplines, and if so, whether these patterns differ among disciplines. The data were collected from 10 sample paragraphs randomly drawn from 10 textbooks at the undergraduate and graduate levels from five disciplines: physics, biology, economics, political science, and history. Using Halliday and Hasan's method of cohesive analysis, a frequency count for each sample was made.;The findings indicate that there is homogeneity within each field when the frequency of ties is grouped by structural categories. When grouped by functional categories, there is homogeneity within biology and physics whereas the other disciplines show greater variability. In comparisons among the disciplines, the chi-square tests indicate that there are significant differences in the distribution of ties that could be attributed to the influence of academic discipline.;A secondary line of research tested for the influence of author's style in the distribution of cohesive ties. Though there is insufficient evidence, it is likely that there is no relationship.;Results indicate that the disciplines of physics and biology rely heavily on the use of "the" and the repetition of lexical items, giving a high degree of clarity and formality to the texts. Economics and political science use pronomials more frequently than demonstratives and have a more even distribution between repetition of the same lexical item and synonyms. History uses collocation, synonyms, and repetition of the same lexical item, indicating a greater dependence on the prior vocabulary knowledge of readers.;The counts in each discipline were grouped in two ways, by structural class and by functional category, so that a description of frequency of types of ties could be made. Chi-square tests at the p < .05 level were conducted within each discipline to establish its degree of homogeneity. The total counts for all disciplines were compared with each other to determine whether the distribution of ties is influenced by the discipline. |
