The usage of definite and indefinite articles in the PhD dissertations by the male and female writers: A corpus based study

In this research, it was aimed to determine the usage of definite and indefinite articles in the doctoral dissertations (PhD) of the male writers (MWs) of the English Language and the female writers (FWs) of English. This study was limited to identifying the usage of articles in the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) dissertations written by the male writers (MWs) of English and the female writers (FWs) of English in the field of ELT and Applied Linguistics; between the years of 2010-2019. It was also be limited to the abstract, the methodology, and the conclusion sections of the PhD dissertations. Furthermore, it was limited to 50 MWs dissertations and 50 FWs dissertations. In this study, with the help of the Key Word in Context (KWIC) Concordance programme, the usage of articles was analyzed according to their frequency per 1,000 words. Besides the frequency analysis, log-likelihood (LL) calculation was also used as a statistical analysis. At the end of the study, it was found out that the LL frequency of the articles indicated an underuse in the three sections for the Ph.D. dissertations of the male writers (MWs) of English and the female writers (FWs) of English, and there was a significant difference in the frequency of the definite and indefinite articles between the dissertations of the MWs of English and the FWs of English.