A contrastive study of determiner usage in EST research articles

This paper analyzes the use of determiners in the research article (RA) genre. Research articles representing eight fields within the domain of science and technology were selected from respected journals, two articles in each field, with a total of 65,729 words. Two research articles from TESOL, a field outside the realm of science and technology, were also selected for comparison. The determiners were identified and counted in each article. The total number of words per RA was determined by means of a computer word-count utility to guarantee accuracy and uniformity. The zero articles, which are not visible to the word-counting program, were added to the total word count for each article before the percentages of occurrence were calculated. The data obtained were analyzed not only in terms of the whole corpus but also with the life and physical sciences treated separately. It is concluded that, as far as determiner use is concerned, the research article as a genre appears to maintain its boundaries no matter what the topic while it differs in specific ways from fictional prose. The study also confirms that although the may appear to be the most frequent word, the zero article is the most frequent free morpheme in the English language.