A corpus-based functional analysis of music discourse comparing expert and novice academic writing

Abstract

Music is central to the human experience. While its signification may be shaped by language, one of the primary linguistic discourses about musical meaning, that of music scholars, is itself delimited by another semiotic: musical score notation. Applied Linguistics research has sought to illuminate the structures of disciplinary-specific discourses in English, the lingua franca of academia, but has yet to investigate the discourse of music scholars. These scholars work within the field of Musicology and related areas of Ethnomusicology and Music Theory. The present study extracts lexical bundles from two purpose-built corpora of expert and novice writings. These bundles are then categorized and analyzed according to structure, function, and content. The interactions of these bundles with ambient propositional content are then examined and categorized to understand how this interaction constitutes patterns unique to this specific disciplinary discourse at both the expert and novice level. From this, the epistemological concerns of the discipline are extrapolated. Findings from both corpora are compared to determine the degree of competence exhibited by novice writers.

Date of Award	Nov 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Derek Irwin (Supervisor)