A Corpus-based Multi-dimensional Analysis Of The Disciplinary Differences Of English Academic Papers

With the development of academic English research,corpus analysis plays an important role in research of English register,which also leads to the diversification of language research methods.Biber put forward the multi-dimensional analysis and originally applied to the study of differences between spoken and written language.Previous register research usually focused on a small number of features,while multi-dimensional analysis method can observe dozens of linguistic features at the same time and make quantitative analysis.Therefore,it has been applied in different register research.The procedure of multi-dimensional analysis is more complex.There are few relative researches published in China,and most of them focus on the differences between the two registers or the differences between Chinese and foreign languages in the use of the same register,rarely from the perspective of disciplinary differences.Therefore,different from the previous studies,this paper aims to analyze the differences between English academic papers of Arts and Humanities and English academic papers of Physical Sciences on the five dimensions and finds the internal linguistic features in every dimension.The purpose of this study is to answer the following research questions:1.What are the general features of English academic papers of Arts and Humanities and English academic papers of Physical Sciences on the five dimensions?What are the similarities and differences?2.What are the differences in the use of internal linguistic features on the same dimension between English academic papers of Arts and Humanities and English academic papers of Physical Sciences?This study uses the BAWE corpus(British Academic Written English Corpus)as the research data.This study establishes two corpora which select 60 English academic papers in Arts and Humanities(shorted as AH)and 60 English academic papers in Physical Sciences(shorted as PS).In order to assure the accuracy of data,IVthis study chooses stratified sampling.MAT(multidimensional analysis tagger 1.1)designed by Nini and SPSS(statistical product and service solutions)is utilized to process the data.Through the contrastive analysis between two corpora,the following conclusion has been achieved:Firstly,regarding the general features,on Dimension 1 and Dimension 5,there are statistically significant differences between the AH corpus and PS corpus.However,there are no salient difference on Dimension 2,Dimension 3 and Dimension4.To be specific,on Dimension 1,both two corpora are characterized by informational production because the dimension scores of the two corpora are both negative,but the PS corpus is higher information density than AH corpus.On Dimension 2,both dimension scores of two corpora are negative,and therefore the two corpora are non-narrative.On Dimension 3,because both the dimension scores of two corpora are positive,they are marked by explicit,elaborated reference and situation-independent.On Dimension 4,two corpora are non-persuasion,because their scores are negative.On Dimension 5,the two corpora are both positive,so they are both abstract.However,the PS corpus is more abstract than AH corpus.Secondly,the differences of internal linguistic features are listed as follows: On Dimension 1,there are statistically significant differences between AH corpus and PS corpus on the 8 linguistic features,while there are no salient differences in other features.Compared with the AH corpus,PS corpus underuses present tense verbs,2nd person pronouns,1st person pronouns,discourse particles,indefinite pronouns,and WH questions;its type/token ratio is relatively high and overuses final prepositions.On Dimension 2,two corpora use fewer past tense verbs and third person pronouns,but there are statistically significant differences on the two linguistic features.Compared with PS corpus,AH corpus uses more past tense verbs and third person pronouns.On Dimension 3,there are statistically salient differences on WH relative clauses,pied piping constructions and place adverbials.AH corpus uses more WH relative clause.PS corpus uses more the last two linguistic features.They frequently use nominalizations and phrasal coordination.On Dimension 4,there are significant differences between the two corpora on predication modals and conditional subordination,PS corpus uses more predication modals and conditional subordination.On Dimension 5,there are significant differences on conjuncts,past participial clauses,agentless passives and past participial WHIZ deletion relatives.AH corpus uses more the first two linguistic features.PS corpus uses more the last two linguistic features.This study can help English learners understand the differences of linguistic features so as to choose appropriate expressions.Teachers can teach students English academic writing methods according to characteristics of English academic papers and help students understand more accurate use of language.Textbook editors can fully understand the linguistic features in English academic paper writing,and provide more scientific and effective learning materials and teaching materials.In the future,it can be studied in more language field and discipline fields.