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Syntactic markers of an academic text in professional and students’ writing: a corpus-based analysis of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ disciplines
The study is a quantitative analysis of the use of syntactic markers of academic discourse in two kinds of corpora: expert corpora which comprise articles published in peer-reviewed journals in management and economics and learner corpora of students’ research papers in the same disciplines. The syntactic constructions selected for the analysis are taken from various guidebooks and textbooks in academic writing. They are it-clefts; pseudo-clefts; th-wh constructions; attitudinal clauses; various types of adverbial clauses; relative clauses and non-finite clauses. The paper aims at identifying the differences between student and professional writing as well as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ disciplines in order to facilitate EAP teachers to design their courses in academic writing in the conditions of limited classroom time making them more discipline specific and relevant to learners’ needs.