Marked themes in academic writing: a comparative look at the sciences and humanities

Abstract

Differences between science writing and humanities writing often appear as glosses in guidebooks, but empirical studies comparing these two genres of writing are uncommon. This study investigated the use of a highlighting mechanism – the Hallidayan notion of the marked Theme (MT) – to understand how the sciences and humanities foreground contextual information, and what this implies about the nature of writing in these two broad disciplines. The corpus comprised 80 research articles, 40 each from the sciences and humanities. MTs were analyzed for their grammatical forms and functions using the Hallidayan framework. The findings revealed that while both genres of writing had roughly the same proportions of MTs used, they differed in their use of thematized clauses. More non-finite clauses were found in science writing, and more finite clauses in humanities writing. Science writing favored the use of Cause MTs, whereas humanities writing used more Contingency and Angle MTs. These findings suggest that science writing values brevity and authorial presence. Humanities writing, by contrast, prefers a more elaborate writing style, with a focus on establishing the conditions needed for the authors’ interpretations, and integrating the viewpoints from other scholars. Suggestions for further research involving other disciplines and multi-disciplinary fields of study are recommended.