Cross-disciplinary comparisons in a corpus of spoken academic English
Rita C. Simpson (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, USA)
This paper examines four disciplinary sub-corpora of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) in order to characterize some of the linguistic differences in the spoken language of disciplinary genres. MICASE currently consists of almost one million words of transcribed speech, including both classroom speech events such as lectures, discussion sections, seminars, and labs, as well as non-classroom speech events such as office hours, research group meetings, and advising sessions, to name a few. Where applicable, all the speech events in MICASE are classified into one of four academic divisions: physical sciences and engineering, biological and health sciences, social sciences and education, and humanities and arts. For the present study I used the concordance program Wordsmith Tools to identify key words and key lexical phrases for each academic division and then analysed the functions and distributions of several of the non-lexical words or phrases within each sub-corpus. Non-lexical key words such as pronouns, hedges, stance adverbials, and modal verbs provide insights into the characteristic linguistic styles associated with the different academic divisions and the ways recurring speech patterns reflect epistemological differences.
The paper discusses several linguistic features that pattern differently across two or more academic divisions. For example, the hedges kind of and sort of and filled pauses (um, uh) are most frequent in the humanities and least frequent in the physical sciences. Personal pronouns are also identified as key words in at least two of the divisions: in the physical sciences, first and second person pronouns are key words, while third person pronouns are key in the humanities and social sciences. Other noteworthy cross-disciplinary differences include use of the discourse marker so, the hedging verb seem, and several other common verbs. Quantitative comparisons are coupled with more detailed pragmatic analyses in order to more accurately characterize the nature of disciplinary discourse. Implications for teaching English for Academic Purposes are also discussed.