Abstract

The study of academic discursive genres has received special attention in the last decade. However, studies on the thesis genre are still incipient, especially from the lexical-grammatical empirical perspective. Our main aim is to describe lexical-grammatically each rhetoric move of the genre thesis in linguistics, extracting and quantifying trigrams of lemmas in a set of texts composed by 33 undergraduates Linguistics thesis. Corpus linguistics tools are used for the automatic labeling of their lexical units, specifically to identify the pattern of lemmas used in the statistical analysis. Among the most relevant findings, it is worth noting that the trigrams of lemmas make it possible to differentiate 99.3% moves of the genre. In addition, the trigrams of each move are identified, which are functionally related to each communicative purpose. These findings make possible to establish a clear relationship between the linguistic forms and the communicative functions carried out in this genre. In addition, these results have applications for the development of writing assistant tools, from a perspective of the genre-based pedagogy.