چكيده
Exemplification is a discourse function used in all aspects of all languages, including written and oral forms, formal and informal uses, and academic and non-academic settings. Exemplification is a recurrent feature of academic writing and a central aspect of exposition, a part of the routine ways in which writers in all fields seek to make their ideas accessible and persuasive (Hyland, 2007). Without examples, theories and results remain vague. Authors, therefore, use examples to mitigate readers’ doubts by anticipating their worries and satisfying their expectations. (Triki, 2021). The study aims to investigate using exemplifications in a total corpus of 90 doctoral dissertations and master theses written by Iranian and Native students in applied linguistics. The purpose of the study is to find out if there is any significant difference in the use of exemplificatory markers and local grammar patterns in Iranian M.A. theses, Iranian Ph.D. dissertations and Native Ph.D. dissertations. Automatic and manual annotation is used to search potential candidates. To perform the annotation UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell, 2008) was used. Using the descriptive analytical method and chi-square test, the results show that there is significant difference in using exemplificatory markers between Iranian M.A. theses and Ph.D. dissertations in applied linguistics as well as Native Ph.D. dissertations in applied linguistics. Also, the analysis and chi-square test show that there is significant difference in using local grammar patterns in the three corpora. The investigation shows that although the Iranian M.A. and Ph.D. students used exemplification as frequently as Native Ph.D. students, to specify abstract superordinate categories, they underused exemplification with regard to aspects such as performative verbs, exemplificatory imperatives, and the strategy of exemplifying by citing relevant studies. The implication of this study is that the exercise of local grammar analysis can help to raise academic writers’ awareness of the phraseological or patterned nature of language in terms of lexical-grammatical patterning, as well as discourse-semantic patterning.
