Exemplification in Chinese English-major MA students' and expert writers’ academic writing: A local grammar based investigation

Abstract

This study adopts a local grammar approach to investigate exemplification in Chinese English-major MA student writers' and expert writers' academic writing. Using corpora compiled of Chinese English-major MA students' degree dissertations and expert writers’ published research articles in the field of Applied Linguistics as the data, the investigation shows that although the Chinese MA student writers used exemplification as frequently as expert writers 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 implications of local grammar based investigation into academic writing for EAP writing research and pedagogy are further discussed.