The ‘Interdisciplinary Research Discourse’ project held its second seminar at the University of Birmingham on 29th June. At the seminar, the results of various linguistic analyses, including Multi-Dimensional Analysis, Topic Modelling, and Phraseological Profiling, were presented. The aim of these analyses was to investigate the discourse of the interdisciplinary journal Global Environmental Change, along with 10 other journals dealing with environmental and related issues in the physical and social sciences. In addition, the researchers also interviewed and surveyed writers, reviewers and editors of the journal, the results of which were also presented at the seminar. The two-year project was funded by the ESRC and was supported by Elsevier publishers, who provided a corpus of the journal articles and assisted with conducting the survey and citation analysis.
multidimensional analysis
Interim seminar: multidimensional analysis
In order to investigate what linguistic features distinguish between monodisciplinary and interdisciplinary journal discourses, we employed Biber’s (1988) multidimensional (MD) analysis. This well-known technique in corpus linguistics investigates quantitative correlations between language features in texts and discloses functional similarities and differences between corpora. The corpus used for this study consists of all the research papers published in 11 journals over 10 years, which were provided by our partners, Elsevier publishers. Continue Reading