ABSTRACT
This chapter makes explicit the data and analysis by which the research study addresses the research questions. The structuring divisions were categorised on the basis of the standard classification of introduction, methods, results and discussion sections. Transforming a generic activity into a realisation of an end depends on both the kind and the quality of the activity’s connection to that end. The frequency of metadiscursive nouns was then counted, through which a comparison was made across different disciplines, rhetorical divisions of research articles and among different lexical-grammatical patterns. Both descriptive and inferential statistics are used by which raw and normed frequency present the overall distribution of metadiscursive nouns and log-Likelihood ratio tests provide the most convenient and established way to compare their uses across research articles divisions and disciplines. Metadiscursive nouns were extracted from the corpus by regular expression query, which is proposed as a more effective approach.
