Linguistic and Structural Analyses of Stand-Alone Literature Reviews: Seventy-Five Years of Change.

摘要

The purpose of this dissertation is to offer a multifaceted overview of stand-alone literature reviews. These texts, literature reviews published unattached to research articles, have existed for centuries but remained largely unstudied by linguists. Thus, the goal of this project is to present these reviews' situational, grammatical, and structural characteristics over time and across disciplines to allow for comparisons with other registers of academic prose.;The study presented here is based a corpus of 417 stand-alone literature reviews in three disciplines: medicine, education, and psychology. Reviews within each discipline are also divided by time period (i.e., 1940--1964, 1965--1989, and 1990--2014), with reviews for the corpus selected from the years around 1950, 1980, and 2010. Two other distinctions are also made: review type, operationalized as qualitative with methods, qualitative without methods, or quantitative with methods, and review status, operationalized as peer reviewed or invited.;Four different analyses are undertaken with discipline, time period, review type, and review status functioning as independent variables in each analysis. A preliminary investigation of the discourse domain (i.e., frequency and types of reviews present) and context (e.g., authorship, audience) for literature reviews in existence during the seventy-five years between 1940 and 2014 undergirds the structural and linguistic analyses. The second analysis undertaken is a genre analysis of both organizational structures (e.g., sections present), and moves (e.g., establish a research gap) within introductory, methods and concluding sections in reviews from 1950 and 2010. Subsequent analyses then expand to cover all sections and reviews from 1950, 1980, and 2010 with a register analysis of forty-five individual grammatical features and a multidimensional analysis based on the first five dimensions established by Biber (1988). Statistical analyses offer a portrait of the differences between groups of stand-alone literature reviews while textual excerpts further exemplify linguistic and structural characteristics.;The results show that reviews have changed dramatically over the last seventy-five years. Review types have evolved and new review sections have appeared since 1940. By 2014, quantitative reviews (i.e., meta-analyses) are common and respected in the journals studied, and methods sections are included in qualitative stand-alone literature reviews in many journals. Individually, grammatical features within reviews were found to differ significantly by three out of four independent variables--disciplines, time period, and review type--revealing changes in stance, narrativity, colloquialization, and elaborated vs. compressed sentence structure. Finally, multidimensional analysis revealed that stand-alone literature reviews are elaborated, non-narrative, non-evaluative texts.