ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the corpus-based studies of disciplinary variation and of written interdisciplinary research discourse. The Discipline Corpus was created using the freeware computer programme ‘BootCat’. The program retrieves the pages, removes extraneous detail and creates a single corpus file, in which each text is preceded by the URL of the source text, as a heading. The corpus that Coxhead created in order to build the Academic Word List, by contrast, was divided into ‘Arts’, ‘Commerce’, ‘Law’ and ‘Science’, which reflects the institutional organisation of faculties at the New Zealand university. The corpus-based research on disciplinary variation has tended to regard disciplines as unproblematic entities which can be characterized as having distinctive ways of writing and of thinking. The disciplinary approach that we take is to use corpus analysis and close reading techniques, working with a sizeable corpus of articles.
