Linking words in Russian Social Studies course books: a study on text complexity
Marina Solnyshkina1, Maria Kazachkova2, Elzara Gafiyatova3*, Elena Varlamova4
1Doctor in Philology, Professor, Kazan Federal University, Russia, mesoln@yandex.ru
2Ph. D. in Philology, Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Russia, mbkazachkova@yandex.ru,
3*Ph. D. in Philology, Kazan Federal University, Russia, rg-777@yandex.ru,
4Ph. D. in Philology, Kazan Federal University, Russia, el-var@mail.ru
Abstract
In this study we examine the context of transitional connectives ‘firstly’ (Rus. ‘vo-pervyh’), secondly (Rus.’vo-vtoryh’), thirdly (Rus. ‘v-tretyih’), in the fourth place (Rus. ‘v-chetvertyh’), in the fifth place (Rus. ‘v-paytyh’) in the corpus of Russian school textbooks on Social Studies (grades 5th – 11th). The Corpus was compiled by a group of Kazan Federal University researchers and marked as RRC (Russian Readability Corpus). To ensure reproducibility of the research results and Corpus online availability, RRC developers uploaded the corpus with the shuffled order of sentences on the website (Authors’ Database, 2017). The corpus is presented by texts of two sets of school textbooks written by L. N. Bogolubov (Bogolubov, 2017) and A.F. Nikitin (Nikitin, 2017), both recommended by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation. We view specialized corpora as preferable for discourse patterns studies and share Biber’s point of view that linguistic tendencies are quite stable with ten (and to some extent even five) text samples per genre or register (Biber 2006). Based on the abovementioned assumptions, the authors view RRC with its total size of 525,748 tokens as a representative corpus of Russian academic discourse. The present study investigates two research questions: RQ1: Are the variety and frequency of numerical connectives in linear regression to text complexity? RQ2: What syntactic patterns are used after numerical connectives ‘firstly’ (Rus. ‘vo-pervyh’), secondly (Rus.’vo-vtoryh’), thirdly (Rus. ‘v-tretyih’), in the fourth place (Rus. ‘v-chetvertyh’), in the fifth place (Rus. ‘v-paytyh’) in Russian high school academic discourse? With the help of AntConc, a concordance program which shows search results in a 'KWIC' (Key Word In Context) format, we determined the absolute frequency of transitional connectives ‘firstly’ (Rus. ‘vo-pervyh’), secondly (Rus.’vo-vtoryh’), thirdly (Rus. ‘v tretyih’), in the fourth place (Rus. ‘v-chetvertyh’), in the fifth place (Rus. ‘v-paytyh’). The research indicated a positive linear regression in the number of the numerical transitional connectives from 0 (in the textbooks of the 5th grade to 10 (firstly, Rus. ‘vo-pervyh’) in the textbooks of the 10th and 11th grades. The syntactic analysis of the context of transitional connectives indicate that the most widely used syntactic construction after all numerical connectives in the Russian academic discourse of Social science are (in descending order) the following: 1) SVO, where the subject (S) is manifested with a noun phrase (about 34%), infinitive constructions (12%), modal constructions (9%); 2) inverted word order OSV (42%) 3) VSO (3%). The results of this research provide us with insights into the general patterns of the academic discourse and cohesion.
Keywords: cohesion, text complexity, transitional connectives, corpus, academic discourse
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