2026 Theses Doctoral

Mathematics Text Style: Constructing and Applying a Comparative Framework to Texts in Japan and the United States

Yamamoto, Kaori

This dissertation examines the style of mathematics texts, conceptualizing it as the cumulative effect of repeated authorial choices that becomes empirically visible when those choices are compiled and compared across texts. Although mathematics text research has addressed language, representation, and structure, style itself has remained undertheorized.

To address this gap, the study constructs a comparative framework through a hermeneutic synthesis of style theories from art history, literature, linguistics, and social semiotics, integrated with established perspectives in mathematics education. This theoretical work yields a three-part framework encompassing verbal language, visual display, and verbal-visual relationships. The framework is applied through qualitative content analysis to a bounded set of four high school texts on geometry and statistics from Japan and the United States.

These texts were selected to enable comparative analysis rather than to support generalization. Approximately 400 verbal language items and 40 double-page spreads were coded. Within this dataset, the results demonstrate recurring stylistic contrasts: the Japanese texts tend toward closed, authoritative, and relatively univocal style, while the American texts tend toward more open, dialogic, and heterogeneous style. The distinctive stylistic profile of the American statistics text was also identified.

By triangulating observations across verbal, visual, and verbal-visual components, this dissertation demonstrates how style can be examined as an emergent alignment of repeated expressive choices. The study contributes a foundation for future research into the sociocultural and educational implications of stylistic norms in mathematics education.