Comparability of all texts in the corpora was ensured by selecting research papers that describe a piece of research, which means that they all involve a certain number of participants or groups of participants. The section where this becomes most relevant for our study of reference is the Results or Results and discussion section(s). Participants in both RAs and MA theses were referred to by pronouns, or with the use of demonstratives. Nevertheless, RAs again tended to use somewhat more demonstratives with an exact repetition of the accompanying noun, but these differences are not less considerable between high- and low-rated MA theses.

 

 

While Table 24 shows that participants are generally referred to by plural pronouns (which explains their density in the corpora), singular pronouns were also more frequent in MA theses. This is because several thesis writers described the results of their interviews with several research participants quite extensively. Most of the time, singular pronouns were used to refer to these participants as in the extract from LTH5.

s. 172 The third teacher I am going to refer to found it problematic […] s. 173 She argues that the word „adequate” is very broad and subjective […] s. 174 When deciding how many points to give for task achievement, she was influenced by her language exam rater. (LTH5)

 

Clearly, the fact that MA theses have more space to report interviews or explain classroom observations in such detail does not mean that it is a characteristic of novice writers that they use more pronouns than experts. This difference in the number of pronouns is great, but it is due to the difference between the lengths of the two subgenres.