Exploring Lexico-grammatical Patterns in Doctoral Dissertations: A Multidimensional Analysis

Abstract

Doctoral dissertations occupy a prominent place in academic communication and advancement. This genre applies its intricate lexical and grammatical patterns to shape its effectiveness and these patterns need to be studied. The study aims to investigate the discussion section of the doctoral dissertations from ten leading British universities. The objective of the study is to explore the lexico-grammatical similarities and differences between ELT and Linguistics dissertations. It also attempts to analyze how far the lexico-grammatical choices used in the discussion section of ELT dissertations are similar to or different from those of Linguistics. The corpus used in this study consists of 200 discussion sections: 100 from ELT and 100 from Linguistics. A random sampling technique was used to collect data which consisted of publicly available dissertations. Biber’s Tagger was used to annotate grammatical and lexical features. To find out the significant interaction between the selected disciplines, a factorial ANOVA was used. The study is significant in terms of providing insight into the preferred lexico-grammatical patterns used by the students. It further explains how two different disciplines – Linguistics and ELT, make various lexico-grammatical choices. The findings of the study will help the researcher from around the world, particularly the ones from non-English speaking countries, in terms of familiarizing them with the conventions involved in writing a dissertation.