Abstract
A growing body of research has focused on the differences between the academic writing of individual disciplines (e.g. Gray, 2015; Hyland, 2004, 2008).
However, mathematical texts in general, and specifically mathematical research articles, are underrepresented in research into phraseology of scientific texts. The present study focuses on the distributional phraseology of mathematical texts.
The aim is the identification and constructional description of key elements of mathematical research articles, which can be seen as the basic building blocks of this genre. In accord with the general principles of construction grammar, the study is corpus-driven, relying on inductive methods for identification of the key elements.
The corpus used (870,885 words) has been compiled for this purpose, and includes mathematical research papers from three fields, namely algebra, mathematical analysis, and probability & statistics. The main method applied is keyword extraction. 15 grammatical keywords have been extracted, namely let, we, then, if, where, hence, every, since, now, any, moreover, whenever, therein, whence, otherwise.
Concordance lines for each of the keywords are analysed in detail. Each of the words participates in one construction at least.