continued from No. 1, 3,
4, 6, 8,
10, 12,
14, 16
STARTING AND FINISHING MASTER’S THESIS
An MA thesis in any field of knowledge is usually written in accord
with some universal scheme that is highly standardised. This applies both to the structure
of the whole text, its design and to the arrangement of individual parts. Depending on the
type of research, the composition and the content of its individual parts may slightly
vary. An MA thesis usually consists of the following parts:
1. Introduction or Preamble where the researcher
states his / her aims and introduces the main claim;
2. Theoretical part which provides a framework for research;
3. Analytical (experimental) part which displays the process of examining
a particular subject, the methods and principles applied;
4. Conclusion which describes the results of the research done after
considering all the information collected. In Linguistics Studies one is also to have a
summary of Conclusion, either in English or in the native language;
5. Bibliography;
6. Appendix (if any).
Introduction
You might draft your Introduction quite early, but it will probably be
the last thing you revise into its final form. It will be one of the first bits the reader
looks at. Here you need to catch the readers’ interest, and persuade them that it is
worth reading further.
Introduction in good academic writings tends to follow fairly standard patterns,
consisting of particular items. But it is a piece of writing presented as a textual unity
in which you explain the initial positions of your research and declare its aim and
significance. Never use for your introduction the preambles of books on similar subjects.
Different books have different aims and do not meet the requirements of your research.
First of all, you should state the object of study, i.e. the area of knowledge that
interests you, for example, written texts belonging to specific spheres of activity –
science / medicine / business, etc. and scholarly literature on lexicography.
Then, you should narrow the field of research to a particular aspect and state the subject
of research, e.g. special terminology (election / cardiology /
basketball / glassblowing, if you are not going to deal with structural patterns) and
terminography, that is the way terms are registered and standardized in terminological
dictionaries.
Next, you should prove that the subject of your research is a matter of current topical
interest to science and society. The subject of research should be up to date,
immediately touching upon urgent linguistic problems, in your case, the problems of
terminology, as it is in this domain that the development of civilization is indicated and
special terms serve as an instrument of professional work and training.
The aim of research is to create new knowledge, whatever the discipline. The aim of
your research is therefore to make a contribution to the field of linguistics which
increases the sum of knowledge. It may be formulated, for example, in the following way:
to present theoretical as well as practical aspects of compiling a dictionary of special
terms; or to describe linguistic relations between terms and the general vocabulary; or to
classify and systematise language units united by a common concept within the semantic
field of business / electronics / sports, etc.
One of the steps you will need to take next is to formulate the main claim in the form of
a statement, argument, or hypothesis. A hypothesis is a tentative or temporary solution to
a scientific problem or an explanation for why something happens. Although a hypothesis
usually develops from the intuition of the researcher, it is based on observation of
facts. If there is no hypothesis or claim, your work will not meet the requirements of a
research project and will present a collection of fact and examples, a description of the
current or historical state of your problem. A hypothesis is always written in the form of
a complete sentence, not a sentence fragment or a question. Most hypotheses are stated in
the Present Simple, although it is possible to hypothesize about something that took place
in the past or will happen in the future. Sometimes a hypothesis is expressed as a
prediction, using the future tense with will.
The probable claims in your research may be formulated as follows: the terms under study
(business / legal / medical, etc) form a closely knit sector of vocabulary
characterized by a common concept and form a semantic field of business / law /
medicine. All the terms within this field are semantically interdependent, as each member
helps to delimit and to determine the meaning of its neighbours and is semantically
delimited and determined by them. This sector of vocabulary (e.g. a semantic field of
electronics) has a certain structure and comprises a compact core (centre) and a gradual
periphery, as not all the units of this class can be characterized by all the features.
Those words that comprise all the characteristic features constitute the centre and are
terms proper, the peripheral elements are less characterised and function as terms under
certain conditions, in collocation with other elements, they are referred to as quasi-terms
or pseudo-terms.
As a next step you should prove the reliability of the results of your research.
The reliability of your research is provided by the analysis of the authentic materials of
English / American / Polish / Russian special literature.
Theoretical grounds is still another issue you should mention in your introduction.
It is an area of approaches, ideas and opinions that you share with other people working
in the same field of knowledge. You should state that in your research you apply the
general theoretical principles established in the investigations by, for example,
F. Grucza (1991), J. Lukszyn (2001), J.C. Sager (1990).
The following stage is to identify the novelty of your research – the ideas,
approaches, methods which would attract people’s attention and interest. In this
respect, of prime value is the material of your research, the data-base. Hence, new
information yeilds new results.
Theoretical and practical significance. As for theory, your research should
contribute to the development of principles and approaches to terminology, lexicography
and terminography, or translation. Practical significance lies in the fact that your
data-base might provide the foundations for a special dictionary of legal /
administrative / business, etc. terms based on historical / encyclopaedical and
other principles.
Material: what kind of data? where from? – authentic literature on the subject
under study: documents, books, journals, magazines, the Internet.
The method applied in research may be identified as a method of overall extraction
(moving) examples out of special literature. Then via parallel conceptual analysis and
definition comparison you complete the terminology data base for the domain.
Introductions usually end with a brief preview of how the thesis is organized, so that
readers have a rough map as they set out through the text. Structure: the project
consists of Introduction, two chapters – theoretical and analytical, Conclusion,
Bibliography and Appendix.
Theoretical Part
Theoretical part (framework) includes a brief literature survey, main
relevant sources, main concepts and definitions. You should also critically appraise the
available works on the questions under study and face academic controversies concerning
problems of terminology and terminography.
In this part you should display your theoretical goals. The methodology is basically one
of detailed conceptual analysis. You need to show the knowledge of the basics of
terminology, lexicography, terminography and their origins. The basic concepts and key
terms touched upon in the research should be discussed in this chapter, the most important
issues being the theory of compiling dictionaries, their typology, dictionary components
and structure, organization of lexicographic work. You should also give definitions to
such terms as source language and target language, macrostructure and microstructure,
lemma and equivalent, and explain the distinction between language for general purposes
(LGP) and language for special purposes (LSP).
In the area of theory, some more cognitive and philosophical questions
come to mind:
• What is a concept? What do terms represent?
• How do non-linguistic signs relate to linguistic signs?
• How can synonymy be accommodated in current models?
• How do terms develop? How do terms cross language boundaries?
• What type of relation can be established between concepts?
• How are these relations realized cross-linguistically?
• What can theory tell us about the classification of terms and concepts?
• What can an experiential epistemological approach tell us about terms and their
meanings?
See a sample plan for a theoretical chapter:
1. Languages for special purposes;
2. Terminology: its status, definitions and connections with cognate disciplines;
3. Term as a basic concept in terminology;
4. Lexicography: its definitions and basic concepts;
5. Terminography and its connections with lexicography;
6. Dictionaries of special terms: definition; types and functions; structure and
components.
Analytical / Experimental Part
This part of research is devoted to the analysis of your data base. The
central element in all kinds of analysis, whatever your data, is categorisation. It
involves two basic cognitive processes: looking for differences (variations) and looking
for similarities (patterns). Looking for differences is a process of analysis. This means
breaking a concept or a set of data down into smaller units. Looking for similarities is a
process of synthesis, of generalisation. It means looking for regularities, shared
features, patterns. The formation of relevant categories is one of the most crucial and
difficult parts of a research project.
A category is a system of coordinated units expressing a common generalized meaning. The
formulation of categories in a particular research project is determined partly by the
nature of the material being studied, and partly by the choice of theoretical model and
its basic concept.
Categories are yet another form of interpretive hypothesis: you propose a category if it
allows you to say something interesting, to make a valid generalisation, or to formulate a
precise hypothesis about some part of data. These categories can be precisely defined in
terms of essential features: if something has these essential features, it belongs to the
category. Classical (Aristotelian) categories are black-and-white, watertight boxes: for
instance, you either pass an exam, or fail it – there are two categories here, and they
are mutually exclusive, not overlapping.
But it is very often the case that many of the categories we use in everyday life are
fuzzy ones, with fuzzy boundaries. For instance, take the category-pair ‘young –
old’: it is impossible to draw a precise dividing line between them. Natural categories
often have a prototype structure, with clear, most typical examples in the centre of the
category and less typical examples on the periphery (terms proper: quasi-terms /
pseudo-terms).
A related set of categories constitutes a classification. The word classification
comes from the word class – meaning a group of things that all have one
important element in common. A classification might be a simple binary one, or combination
of two binary ones, etc. Another kind of classification is a continuum, or a cline (technical:
a series of very small differences in a group of things of the same kind), which may be
punctuated by various intermediate stages. Categories on a continuum tend to be fuzzy
ones.
Because categories and classifications are interpretive hypotheses, they too need to be
justified and tested: Do they give interesting results? Add value? Represent the data
adequately? How do they relate to categories and classifications proposed by other
representatives?
Any research which adopts an empirical approach to language studies will involve
collecting, processing and interpreting data. To do this, you may need a basic
understanding of some of the principles underlying the discipline of statistics.
Statisticians distinguish ways of establishing the most typical individual values in a
set. The mean is the most frequently used measurement and is what is known in common
parlance as the average, i.e. in order to determine the mean, you simply add all the
values together and divide the total by the number in the set. Thus, if in ten legal
documents a total number of the use of the term ‘statute’ is 50, the average
is 5.
To justify or to back up your data, you might need to present the results of quantitative
analyses. The most significant of them are:
1. Average word and sentence length. Word length can be of interest in contrastive
studies, and sentence length can provide useful insights into translation strategies;
2. Frequency lists. These show how many times each word appears in the corpus;
3. Lexical density. This refers to the proportion of content words in a text or corpus and
can be an indicator of genre or text type;
4. Concordances. A concordance is a tool that lists every occurrence of a selected item in
a text / corpus and displays it in context with a number of preceding and following
words. (K. Aijmer & B. Altenberg, 1991).
A number of quantitative techniques have been developed by researchers
in the field of corpus linguistics to enable them to analyze large volumes of
electronically accessible text. To identify a range of textual features conspicuous for
your material, corpus analysis software WordSmith can be used.
Whatever the results of your research are, you need to decide to what extent it is typical
or special. Typical data prove the validity of your hypothesis. Special data might be
extremely interesting just because they are so special. For instance, they might display
some feature that was only latent or potential in other data. And thus open up a new
avenues of research that were not suspected earlier. Special data can also be useful for
testing a very general claim: does the claim indeed cover this special case? For example,
your claim was that legal and administrative terminology in English is represented by
authentic English words and words borrowed from other languages. But the analysis of your
materials shows that there are no traces of authentic English, or even Germanic roots –
most terms are of Latin and French origin. Here spring up new questions and new claims.
Why are there no original legal terms in English? A new hypothesis which needs to be
proved might be: at the moment of the formation of English legal system, the people that
inhabited the British Isles stood at a very low stage of their social development and did
not have the proper concepts. Those concept and corresponding words were brought in by
more civilized Romans, and then Normans, when they invaded the British Isles.
Sometimes, the results of research turn out to be negative and you did not find any
evidence of new terms, or other linguistic phenomena, in the material under study, though
your claim was that within a certain period of time (e.g. 2000 – 2004) new terms
should have been coined in some area of activity. Negative results are also valid results.
In this case, analyse the sphere of application of the existing terms, probable changes in
their meanings (broadening / generalization or narrowing / specialization), study the
frequency of their occurrence in special texts.
The results of your categorizations, generalizations and specifications may be fixed in
glossaries, thesauri, or dictionaries of different types which are usually presented in
the Appendix.
Appendix
This section of your thesis may be called, for example, English –
Polish / Polish – English Terminological / Encyclopaedic Dictionary
of…cardiology / football / jazz / electronics (with Polish –English
Index, or vice versa). Then follows a short Introduction where you classify your
dictionary either as bilingual or monolingual, terminological or encyclopaedic if it
provides definitions of the terms, etc. and point out a field of knowledge the terms
belong to.
Functions and purposes. Here you may state, for instance, that the
dictionary has been compiled as a helpful and reliable source of information to facilitate
the process of translation. The dictionary combines two fundamental functions as it not
only specifies the constituents of certain reality, but also provides information about
that reality.
Materials and methods. Here you should indicate that the dictionary is
based on varied source material such as documents, books, journals, texts published in the
Internet, dictionaries, etc., found in your own individual capacity and specified in the
Bibliography of your paper.
The dictionary has been compiled in accord with a traditional method of splitting the
process of compilation into several stages. Then follows the description of these stages.
Structure and components. Here you point out that the dictionary is
divided into a number of thematic sections that correspond to the chief areas of the
branch of knowledge under study.
Entries that constitute each section and subsection are listed in alphabetical order.
English terms and their Polish equivalents are boldfaced and arranged horizontally, so
that they form two vertical columns separated by a broad space. Catchwords are followed by
an italicized short definitions in English, whenever possible by other corresponding forms
– adjectival, verbal, etc.
Conclusion
Conclusions are, in a sense, mirror images of Introductions. In other
words, they typically move from the particular research problem to the wider context
again. Typical moves are the following:
1. Move I: restate your main point again, then your main results. Check that your key
terms here match with those you introduced in the Introduction.
2. Move II: claim significance. Explain why you think your work, or some aspect of it, is
valuable. Does it have implications for theoretical development? Does it have practical
applications? Show what consequences your work might have.
3. Move III: assess your own work. Be self-critical and realistically modest about what
you have achieved, claiming your own strengths and acknowledging weaknesses. Disarm
potential critics by admitting possible defects, limited or perhaps not representative
data, weak correlations, etc. This is an important move in theses.
4. Move IV: suggest follow-up research. What should be done next, either by you or by some
other researcher who is interested in this topic? Where is more research needed? What new
problems arise as a result of your work?
Bibliography
Bibliography lists the sources of information used in the
course of work on the research project. The items which constitute each section of the
Bibliography should be listed in alphabetical order. In order to correspond to the
structure of the project, the first section usually comprises the secondary sources
showing theoretical backgrounds, then follow the primary, tertiary and electronic sources.
I. Primary Sources: primary materials where a
researcher finds his empirical evidence (documentary materials), e.g. if the subject of
one’s research deals with terms of European Community, the primary sources may be:
1. Green Paper on the Promotion of Innovations.
2. Package of Anti-crisis Actions for Protection of the Market and Jobs.
3. Treaty Establishing the European Community.
II. Secondary Sources: books and articles that other
researchers have written about your topic:
4. Lukszyn J., Zmarzer W., 2001, Teoretyczne podstawy termonologii, Waszawa.
5. Oakes M. P.,1998, Statistics for Corpus Linguistics, Edinburgh.
6. Sager J. C., 1990, A Practical Course in Terminological Processing,
Amsterdam / Philadelphia.
III. Tertiary Sources: encyclopaedias, dictionaries
and popularized works:
7. Bird R., 1983, Osborn’s Concise Law Dictionary, 7th ed., London.
8. Crystal D., 1988, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, Cambridge.
9. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1995, London.
IV. Electronic Sources:
10. http://www.eng.helsinki.fi/hes/translation.
11. http://forums.compuserve.com.
12. http://www2.ukie.gov.pl.
Activities
Questions
1. What provides the reliability of research?
2. What is a category?
3. What structure do natural categories have?
4. What is the principle of arranging facts into classes?
5. How would you establish the most typical individual values of elements in a set using
statistics?
6. How could quantitative analyses back up the results of research? Give examples.
7. Explain, why the Conclusions of research are mirror images of Introductions?
8. What is the order of sections in Bibliography?
9. Why are special data so important for science in general?
10. What move would you undertake in Conclusions to disarm potential critics of your
research?
Tasks
Task 1. Identify a sample object and a sample subject of research in
relation to terminology; in translation studies; in grammar studies.
Task 2. State a sample aim of research in terminology; in translation
studies; in grammar studies.
Task 3. Formulate a sample claim of research in terminology; in
translation studies; in stylistics.
Task 4. Describe the most traditional method of linguistic research.
By Galina Goumovskaya
|