Gabriella Jenei: Referential Cohesion in Academic Writing • A descriptive and exploratory theory- and corpus-based study of the text-organizing role of reference in written academic discourse
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7. STAGE 3: IMPROVING THE ANALYTICAL TOOL: NON-COHESIVE REFERENCE TAXONOMY FOR ACADEMIC WRITING
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7.5. Methods of analysis

7.5. Methods of analysis

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First, the same referential cohesion analysis was carried out on the new corpus of RAs (RA11–20) and MA theses (TH1–10) as for the first set of RAs (see Section 6.2.4). For the RA corpus, a parallel table with the non-cohesive items was used (described above in detail). As this proved to be inefficient and cumbersome, for the MA theses non-cohesive items were labelled in the analyzed text itself. Therefore, in the analysis of the MA corpus, the subcategories for the categories appeared as tags in block capitals (e.g., EXO for exophoric, NOREF for no presupposed item in the surrounding text, etc.) next to relevant items in the sentence.

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The sentence-by-sentence analysis of the two corpora was again carried out by another researcher, Ildikó Szendrői. Inter-coder reliability was counted on the basis of her analysis compared to the author’s, while intra-coder reliability measures were obtained as a result of the re-analysis of an RA from the RA corpus – using tags, instead of the parallel table for the second round. Between the two analyses of the author a whole year elapsed.

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Testing whether the reliability of the analytical tool is higher with the addition of this taxonomy was carried out on a new set of 10 RAs (RA11–RA20) and 10 MA theses. Besides aiming at testing the validity of the improved analytical tool, this part of the research also tries to explore areas of meaningful comparison between RAs and MA theses. Therefore, at this third stage of this research, answers are sought to the following research questions:

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1. Does the addition of the taxonomy of non-cohesive items improve the validity and reliability of Referential Cohesion Analysis?

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2. What similarities and differences are there between the two corpora of 10 RAs and 10 MA theses in terms of their use of referring items?

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The comparative study proceeded along the lines of the previous study (Stage 2). First, descriptive data will be summarized concerning the frequency and length of cohesive ties. Then local and global patterns will be compared (new and extended chains, linear, merging and splitting chains) in terms of referential cohesion. In the comparison of the two sets of texts the working hypothesis is that in terms of cohesion they will be very similar due to the structural and organizational correspondences between them. It is expected that because of the greater length of MA theses, they contain longer, perhaps mostly linear cohesive chains of ties, while RAs are probably denser in their informational structure, and this should be reflected in the complexity of the cohesive chains.
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