Rhetoric of Master's Theses of Estonian and Anglophone Economics Students

Abstract

Tartu Ülikool Tõlkekeskus Kaur Männamaa RHETORIC OF MASTER’S THESES OF ESTONIAN AND ANGLOPHONE ECONOMICS STUDENTS EESTI JA INGLISE KEELT KÕNELEVATE MAJANDUSTEADUSKONDADE ÜLIÕPILASTE MAGISTRITÖÖDES KASUTATAV RETOORIKA Magistritöö 2014 Lehekülgede arv: 66 This thesis aims to give an overview of the differences in the academic English used by Estonian Master's students and Master's students with an Anglophone academic background. As the field as such is extremely broad, this thesis will focus on comparing the use of various linguistic instruments used for creating cohesion and coherence, as well as hedging. The comparison involves corpora from two universities (University of Tartu and MIT) and relies on computer based text analysis. The thesis consists of five main parts. The introductory part gives a short overview of the aims of the author. Chapter 1 contains the discussion of the key concepts of the thesis and the difficulties involved in defining them. Chapter 2 offers an overview of the field of comparative rhetoric and also introduces similar studies that have been carried out before. Chapter 3 introduces the methods used in conducting the analysis for this thesis and contains discussion on the results reached. The conclusion is a short summary of the aims and results of the study carried out for this thesis.