Term papers in corpus linguistic seminars should follow the so-called IMRaD structure, a standard form of empirical research papers consisting of four sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. To learn more about this standard and its use in general, consult the Wikipedia article on IMRaD. Here, we have adapted it specifically to corpus linguistic research, specifying the questions you should answer in writing each section of your paper. A more detailed version of the questions you should answer in the core part of such a paper and the way you should keep track of them when conducting your research can be found here. Note that it is also useful to use the structure for taking notes while /reading/ corpus linguistic research papers — you can download a document template for such notes as a docx file (Word) or an odt file (Libre Office) (if your browser does not allow the direct download of files, you need to right-click on these links and select “Save Link As” from the context menu.
The introduction should simply be titled Introduction. It must answer the following questions:
In addition, it may answer the following questions:
The methods section can simply be titled Methods, but depending on the focus that you give different aspects of the research design, it can also be titled Methods and Materials, Methods and Data, Data Extraction and Annotation or something similar. It must answer the following questions:
The results section should simply be titled Results. It must contain a compact presentation of your data (in the form of tables and/or diagrams) that answer the following questions:
The discussion section can simply be titled Discussion, but depending on your focus you can also use combinations of the words Summary, Conclusion, and Outlook (if you have a long discussion section, you can use these as subheadings). The section must answer the following questions:
In addition, it may contain answers to the following questions: