How Definite Are The Male And Female Writers?: A Corpus Based Study On The Definite And Indefinite Article Use

Abstract

The study was aimed to describe the use of the definite and indefinite articles in the PhD dissertations of the male writers (MWs) of English and the female writers (FWs) of English. This corpus based study was limited to identifying the use of articles in the PhD dissertations written by the male writers (MWs) and the female writers (FWs) in Applied Linguistics in the scope of ELT; between the years of 2010-2019. It was also be limited to the abstract and the conclusion sections of the PhD dissertations regarding the both genders’ writing procedures of their PhD dissertations. Furthermore, it was focused on dissertations of 50 MWs and 50 FWs that published in American Universities. In this study, with the help of the Key Word in Context (KWIC) Concordance programme, the use of articles was analyzed according to their frequency per 1,000 words. Besides the frequency analysis, loglikelihood (LL) calculation was also used as a statistical analysis. At the end of the study, it was found out that the LL frequency of the articles indicated an underuse in the two sections for the Ph.D. dissertations of the male writers (MWs) of English and the female writers (FWs) of English, and there was a significant difference in the frequency of the definite and indefinite articles between the dissertations of the MWs of English and the FWs of English. These findings have some implications for researchers, academic writing that can guide scholars in terms of the relationship between gender and language use.