Research in the area of academic writing has demonstrated that writing varies significantly across disciplines and among genres within disciplines. Two important approaches to studying diversity in disciplinary academic writing have been the genre-based approach and the corpus-based approach. Genre studies have considered the situatedness of writing tasks, including the larger sociocultural context of the discourse community (e.g., Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Bhatia, 2004) as well as the move structure in specific genres like the research article (e.g., Swales, 1990, 2004). Corpus- based studies of disciplinary writing have focused more closely on the linguistic variation across registers, with the re-search article being the most widely studied register (e.g., Cortes, 2004; Gray, 2011). Studies of under-graduate writing in the disciplines have tended to focus on task classification (e.g., Braine, 1989; Horowitz, 1986a), literacy demands (e.g.,Carson, Chase, Gibson, & Hargrove, 1992), or student development (e.g., Carroll, 2002; Leki, 2007). The purpose of the present study is to build on these previous lines of research to explore undergraduate disciplinary writing from multiple perspectives in order to better prepare English language learners for the writing tasks they might encounter in their majors at a US university. Specifically, this exploratory study examines two disciplines: psychology and chemistry. Through writing task classification (following Horowitz, 1986), qualitative interviews with faculty and students in each discipline, and a corpus-based text analysis of course readings and upper-division student writing, the study yielded several important findings. With regard to writing tasks, psychology writing tasks showed more variety than chemistry. In addition, lower division classes had fewer writing assignments than upper division courses, particularly in psychology. The findings also showed a mismatch between the expectations of instructors in each discipline and students’ understanding of such writing expectations. The linguistic analysis of course readings and student writing demonstrated differences in language use both between registers and across disciplines.

This dissertation uncovers and examines linguistic and functional patterns of student writing in the first two years of college. A corpus of student papers from six disciplines (philosophy, English, psychology, biology, chemistry, and physics) was collected, and multi-dimensional (MD) analysis (Biber, 1988) was used to examine the ways that discipline and paper type influence writing. Further explorations of the data compare lower-level student writing to upper-level student writing, professional academic biology writing, and the discipline-specific approximations of an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course. Findings show that specificity of both linguistic and functional properties exist even at such low levels of disciplinary acculturation. These studies are followed by a summary and contextualization of their findings. Finally, future inquiry using collected data and future investigations into student literacy practices are proposed.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse register variation among Czech internet texts. The method is based on multi-dimensional approach introduced by Douglas Biber. The initial part of the thesis describes various salient features of internet-based texts with their characteristics and examples. The following part offers an overall description of language variation research. The multi- dimensional analysis is then thoroughly described step-by-step. The practical part of the thesis pursues a multi-dimensional analysis of data sample obtained from a web-crawled corpus of Czech language, following the method of implementation of multi-dimensional analysis done on Czech language material. On the basis of the results, the characteristics of internet sub- registers are proposed.

In questo studio si analizza il linguaggio utilizzato nei blog che si occupano di storia dell'arte, genere diffuso online, tramite un corpus di 54 blogs pubblicati nel 2013. Nell'ambito della linguistica dei corpora, l'analisi permette di ridefinire le tradizionali categorie utilizzate per descrivere i blog, fornisce una descrizione tipologica dei post e dei commenti tramite l'utilizzo di un apposito software, oltre a descrivere il livello di specializzazione del linguaggio. Vengono infine riportati esempi di creatività linguistica in questo genere digitale. / This study analyses the language of “art blogs”, i.e. blogs dealing with art, through a specialised corpus of fifty-four blogs published during 2013. Both posts and comments are included in the present investigation into the linguistic character of art blogs. The methodological choices reflect the need for a multifaceted analysis which covers different aspects, from text typology to linguistic creativity and popularisation. A review of the relevant literature on blogs brings to light the need for a specific characterisation of art blogs, since they tend to have a blended style, which cannot be ascribed to the traditional categories of personal and thematic blogging. The distinctive features of posts and comments are then investigated through a multidimensional analysis which reveals that posts and comments are two different text types. Successively, the corpus is compared to a specialised corpus of art announcements, within the field of popularised and specialised discourse. Finally, several examples of linguistic creativity are explored and presented, thus showing that traditional descriptive paradigms are unsuited to analyse the outcomes of art bloggers.

Submitted by Jailda Nascimento (jmnascimento@pucsp.br) on 2016-10-03T15:02:31Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Juliana Pereira Souto Barreto.pdf: 3340189 bytes, checksum: 30f53e6df08e1c7c68807c3dacf8ad70 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-10-03T15:02:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Juliana Pereira Souto Barreto.pdf: 3340189 bytes, checksum: 30f53e6df08e1c7c68807c3dacf8ad70 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-06-30 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The research reported here intends to analyze the production and the evaluation of the written text in the college entrance essays produced by undergraduate applicants. More specifically, this study verifies how the composition tests, written by the applicants during the admission process to the Rio Grande do Norte Federal University (UFRN), are related to the varying dimensions of Brazilian Portuguese, presented in Berber Sardinha, Kauffmann and Acunzo (2014). The research uses the theoretical framework of Corpus Linguistics and the methodological approach of Multidimensional Analysis. The study corpus is composed of one hundred essays written by applicants for admission to higher education undergraduate courses, tagged by Palavras parser and post-processed with a script, which calculates the score of each text into all of the six variation dimensions of Brazilian Portuguese. At first, it is checked how the applicants’ texts are related to the six Brazilian Portuguese varying dimensions. Then, it is observed the variation in relation to the grades award to these essays by examiners in order to determine whether and which correction criteria were met, based on the scores of the Brazilian Portuguese multidimensional analysis. Hence, the outcomes here are likely to provide important contributions to the field of textual production in Portuguese in Brazil, considering that it is vital to develop a more accurate understanding of the language in use applied to the teaching and learning of argumentative text production, written by applicants during their admission to undergraduate courses in Higher Education / A pesquisa aqui relatada tem por objetivo analisar a qualidade do texto escrito nas redações de vestibular produzidas por candidatos à graduação. Mais especificamente, esse estudo verifica o modo como as redações de candidatos ao Ensino Superior da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) elacionam-se às dimensões de variação do português brasileiro, apresentadas em Berber Sardinha, Kauffmann e Acunzo (2014a; 2014b; no prelo). Para isso, a pesquisa recorre ao arcabouço teórico da Linguística de Corpus e à abordagem metodológica da Análise Multidimensional (Biber, 1988). O corpus de estudo, composto por cem redações escritas por candidatos ao ingresso em cursos de graduação do Ensino Superior, foi analisado com o etiquetador Palavras e pós-processado com um script que calcula o escore de cada texto em cada uma das seis dimensões de variação do português brasileiro. Em um primeiro momento, é verificado o modo como as redações dos candidatos relacionam-se às seis dimensões de variação do português brasileiro. Em seguida, a variação é observada em relação às notas dadas às redações por examinadores, a fim de determinar se e quais os critérios de avalição, estipulados para a correção das redações de vestibular, foram atendidos, com base nos escores da análise multidimensional do português brasileiro. Por fim, acredita-se que os resultados aqui encontrados possam vir a proporcionar contribuições relevantes ao campo da produção textual em língua portuguesa no Brasil, uma vez que se faz necessário uma compreensão mais apurada da língua em uso aplicada ao ensino e ao aprendizado da produção de textos argumentativos por candidatos a ingresso em cursos de graduação do Ensino Superior