The Language of Mathematics: A Corpus-based Analysis of Research Article Writing in a Neglected Field  

Oleh:

Anthony, Laurence ; Bowen, Mark

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: The Asian ESP Journal vol. 9 no. 2 (2013), page 5-25.
Topik: ESP; mathematics; research article writing; corpus-based analysis
Fulltext: 5-25.pdf (387.29KB)

Isi artikel

Research article writing has received a great deal of attention from ESP researchers. Analyses of the general structure of Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) articles, as well as detailed analyses of individual sections, including introductions, results, and discussions sections, have dominated the ESP literature, especially following Swales' pioneering work on introductions in the early 1980s. Surprisingly, however, the writing of mathematics research articles has been almost completely neglected to date. A few reasons for this can be speculated, including a) the assumption that mathematics writing is similar to that in the well-covered areas of science and engineering, b) the difficulty in analyzing mathematics research articles due to their often extremely specialized content, and c) the difficulty in locating expert mathematicians who would be willing to serve as specialist informants. In this paper, we present an overview of mathematics writing based on a corpus-based analysis of 410 refereed journal articles covering one complete year of publications in a high-impact mathematics journal. The two-million word corpus was divided into sections, and then analyzed using various corpus tools. Next, the analysis was interpreted by the authors, both of whom have a background in mathematics and one of whom is an active and well-published researcher in mathematics. Results of the study reveal that some macro-level aspects of mathematics writing, such as the basic structuring of titles and introductions, can resemble writing in the fields of science and engineering. On the other hand, many features of mathematics writing diverge greatly from the established norms. We offer reasons for these differences and suggest strategies for teaching writing to a mixed group of science and engineers that may include mathematics majors.

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