A phraseological exploration of recent mathematics research articles through key phrase frames

While a wealth of resources is available for teaching research writing of traditional IMRD research papers, instructors have little to draw on when working with graduate students in mathematics. The present study offers insight into recent mathematical research articles through an exploration guided by phrase-frames, recurring multiword units with a variable slot or blank. The paper introduces the concept of key phrase-frames. In doing so, the potential of phrase-frames for understanding subregisters and for teaching is shown. The starting point of this exploration is a 2,289,670-word corpus of 128 recent mathematics research articles collected from eight scholarly mathematics journals. Five- and six-gram phrase-frames were generated in KfNgram. Key phrase frames are identified as those with an occurrence of at least 20 per million words, occurring across 75% of journals and with a sMAPE of 1.95 cut off or higher when compared to the academic section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English as a reference. The 180 resulting frames were coded for open slot position and common pattern before being consolidated and functionally grouped. Core functions related to the aboutness, coherence and moves of the text. The discussion centers on how these groups reveal different aspects of mathematical texts.