Rees, Geraint Paul2025-05-142025-05-142016Rees GP. Corpus evidence for a discipline-specific phraseological approach to academic vocabulary. RiCL. 2016;4:61-74. DOI: 10.32714/ricl.04.072243-4712http://hdl.handle.net/10230/70391This study examines the validity of the rationale underlying recent trends towards discipline-specific and phraseological approaches to vocabulary selection for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses. It examines the behaviour of Coxhead’s (2000) New Academic Wordlist (AWL) using a 2,795,031 word corpus compiled from journal articles taken from the disciplines of History, Microbiology, and Management Studies. A two-stage method of analysis is employed. Firstly, coverage statistics for all AWL word families and their members are compared across the History, Microbiology, and Management Studies sub-corpora. This suggests difference in language use across disciplines. This difference is investigated further in a second stage of analysis which employs the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004) Word Sketch Difference tool and Corpus Pattern Analysis (Hanks 2004) techniques to examine the collocational behaviour of a sample of 57 AWL headwords across the three sub-corpora. The results demonstrate that a large number of the AWL words have discipline- specific meanings, and that these meanings are conditioned by the syntagmatic context of the AWL item.application/pdfengAuthors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under the BY Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.32714/ricl.04.07Corpus pattern analysisEnglish for academic purposesWordlistSpecialist lexicographySketch engineLanguage analysisinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess