Discipline-specific academic phraseology: corpus evidence and potential applications

Abstract

This chapter argues for an approach to the preparation of lexical resources for EAP courses and materials which is both phraseological and which accounts for differences in word meaning across academic disciplines. After a brief review of literature on the creation of EAP word lists and phrase lists, it sets out an experimental procedure combining Corpus Pattern Analysis (Hanks, 2004, 2013), a technique for mapping meaning onto text, with statistical techniques to examine the collocational behaviour of 30 frequently and widely occurring verbs in an eight-million word corpus comprising research articles representing academic writing in the disciplines of history, management studies, and microbiology. A comparison of collocation pattern frequencies indicates that the majority of the verbs studied exhibit significant differences in prototypical collocation pattern frequency and, by extension, meaning between disciplines. Next, in a series of verb case studies these differences are further examined. Differences include: variations in the semantic type of collocates, semantic prosody, and syntactic arrangement. Beyond the lexical level, the case studies highlight differences in intertextuality, reporting practices, and discourse-organising practices across disciplines, as well as highlighting some salient uses of metaphor. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the potential applications of these findings in EAP resources.