engleski

Analysis of discourse used in texts published in a scientific journal

The aim of this research was to analyze the discourse used in 21 articles (two issues) published in a scientific journal whose scope was the domain of kinesiology. As for the variables mean word length and mean sentence length, multivariate analysis of variance showed the existence of differences between the groups only in the variable gender of authors, and the univariate tests of variance showed that this difference existed between the groups in the variable mean word, i.e. when articles were co-authored by men and women and when co-authored exclusively by male authors, then the mean word length was significantly greater. Pearson’s χ2-test showed that there were no differences between groups of the categorical predictors country of origin of the first author, topic of the article and article category as regards the variables number of tokens [running words] used for the word list, number of types [distinct words] and number of sentences. The smallest distances were to be found between the variables mean word length and mean sentence length as well as between the cluster containing the two previously mentioned variables and connected with the variable number of sentences. The analysis showed that no representative of any of 95 word families listed in Coxhead’s Academic Word List could be found in the analyzed text. The most frequent in the total text analyzed were numbers. The example of the word sport and its concord-related features shows the presence of noun phrases, and the example of patterns in which this word is used reveals the determiner-plus-noun usage. The results yielded by the analyses in this paper point to the existence of some differences in discourse as regards the gender of authors on the one hand, and on the other that the structure of the discourse used in scientific writing in kinesiology indeed has some features that are in compliance with characteristics of scientific discourse in general. However, due to the small sample of texts in this analysis, further research is necessary to be able to make generalizations in this respect.

Characteristics; gender; scientific discourse; structure

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