Search

Authors from different countries have published their papers in English, aiming to promote their research results widely and to become internationally known by their peers. It is also true that, although they are aware of the English terminology used in their respective field, some authors still struggle with some features of academic writing such as collocations. Thus, this paper presents a discussion on the underuse and overuse traces of academic collocations by Brazilian authors who had their articles published in English on an open electronic library of scientific journals. In order to analyse the collocations used by these researchers, we compiled a 906,035-word corpus from eight different academic areas. The collocations observed were statistically compared to those from an academic corpus of English writings which contains texts produced by English-speaking authors. Results showed that there are more collocations underused than overused by the authors. The analysis proved that the collocation repertoire of researchers could be broadened by being pointed out during academic writing workshops.Keywords: academic collocations; research paper writing; corpus linguistics.Resumo: Autores de vários países têm publicado seus artigos científicos em inglês com o intuito de promover amplamente os resultados de suas pesquisas dentre a comunidade científica internacional. É verdade que, embora estejam cientes da terminologia utilizada no respectivo campo de pesquisa, alguns autores ainda apresentam dificuldade em lidar com certas características da escrita acadêmica, como o uso das colocações. Este artigo apresenta uma discussão sobre traços de sobreuso e subuso de colocações acadêmicas utilizadas por autores brasileiros que têm seus artigos publicados em inglês numa plataforma eletrônica aberta de artigos científicos. Para analisar as colocações utilizadas por estes pesquisadores, compilamos um corpus de 906.000 palavras a partir de oito áreas científicas. As colocações analisadas foram comparadas estatisticamente com as colocações de um corpus acadêmico de inglês que contém textos escritos por autores anglófonos. Os resultados mostraram que há mais traços de subuso que sobreuso de colocações acadêmicas utilizadas pelos pesquisadores e este repertório poderia ser ampliado se fossem destacadas durante cursos de escrita acadêmica em língua inglesa.Palavras-chave: colocações acadêmicas; escrita de artigos científicos; linguística de corpus.

The present study deals with modal verb meanings and variation concerning these verbs in a corpus of texts in the field of tourism. For this, we will use a compilation of article introductions and conclusions written in English and published in specialized leading journals on tourism. Modal verbs are important to evince the authors’ stance concerning the propositional content (Palmer, 2001; Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad & Finegan, 1999). Our main areas of concern are a) the modal meanings that are more likely to occur in the texts compiled, and b) the differences there are between the use of modal verbs in introductions and in conclusions in this respect. Research will be performed using corpus tools for text analysis and retrieval. Variation ratios will be evaluated according to a log-likelihood test in order to determine significance of variation according to whether specific modal meanings happen in the introductions or in the conclusions. Conclusions will include information regarding frequencies of occurrence, variation as to the modal meanings preferred per article section, i.e. introduction and conclusion, and the pragmatic functions developed by the use of modal verbs in these sections of the academic papers.

The present study examines modal verb meanings and variation in these verbs in a corpus of texts in the field of tourism. We use a compilation of article introductions and conclusions written in English and published in leading journals specialised in tourism studies. Modal verbs are important to evince the authors’ stance concerning the propositional content (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad & Finegan, 1999; Palmer, 2001). Our main areas of concern are variation in the appearance and use of modal verbs in the introduction and conclusion sections of scientific research articles in terms of their forms and meaning, and variation in the functions of modal verbs in these sections. Variation ratios will be evaluated using a log-likelihood test to determine differences in significance between occurrences in introductions and conclusions. Our conclusions will report, therefore, on the forms, meanings and functions of modal verbs in the sections analysed.

In this chapter, we provide a brief characterization of what we consider the best and most common structure that empirical corpus-linguistic papers can and should have. In particular, we first introduce the four major parts of a corpus linguistics paper: “Introduction”, “Methods”, “Results”, and “Discussion”. Since the nature of corpus data and corpus techniques makes the two sections very field-specific, we then focus more particularly on the “Methods” and “Discussion” sections of a typical quantitative corpus linguistic paper. We provide recommendations that span the research cycle from data description to analyzing the dataset and reporting the results of statistical tests.

The top 1000 biomedical papers by number of citations are classified by method, type of method and non-methods by examination of citation contexts. Supervised machine learning is applied to the context data for a training sample of papers which is then used to classify the full list, revealing that words indicating utility are most important for the classification of methods. Further word analysis is carried out using corpus linguistics to uncover context words that characterize non-methods. Hedging words are found to play an important role for non-methods, and several are selected for further analysis with logistic regression. Other variables in the regression are a consensus variable based on the similarity of contexts for a paper and another variable based on whether citations come from “methods” sections of citing papers. Accuracy of predictions from logistic regression is comparable to machine learning. The results are interpreted in terms of the perceived certainty or uncertainty of the underlying knowledge, that is, methods and their outputs have higher certainty, and non-methods higher uncertainty. Evidence is found that hedging is inversely related to citation frequency. Implications of this work for the study of the development of science and the role of methods and tools in biomedical research are discussed.

Derlem bilim son bir kaç on yılda ikinci dil edinimi araştırmacıları arasında oldukça yaygınlaşmış ve İngilizcenin ikici/yabancı dil olarak eğitimi uygulamalarını etkilemiştir. Derlem bilimin bir alt dalı olan sayısal öğrenci derlemi İngilizcenin ikinci/yabancı dil olarak eğitiminde sıkça kullanılmaktadır.Bu çalışmanın ilk kısmında Ağçam'ın (2014), Türkçe konuşan akademisyenler tarafından yazılmış 48 doktora tezinden derlediği ve Türk Akademik İngilizce Derlemi (TACE) (Ağçam, 2014) diye adlandırdığı derlem incelenmiş ve İngiliz Akademik Yazım İngilizcesi (BAWE) derlemi ile karşılaştırılmıştır. WordSmith Tools yazılımı yazar duruşu fiillerinin sıklığını saymak için kullanılmıştır. Çalışmanın ikinci kısmı eğitim uygulamalarını içermektedir. Çalışmanın ikinci kısmında yazar duruşu fiillerinin sınıfta açıktan öğretilmesinin öğrencilerin yazar duruşu farkındalıklarını arttırıp attırmadığını araştırmak için 5 yazar duruşu farkındalığını arttırma alıştırması bulunmaktadır.Çalışmadaki bulgular gösteriyor ki; Türk akademik yazarlar, İngiliz akademik yazarlardan daha fazla sayıda yazar duruşu ifade eden fiil kullanmış ancak Türk yazarlar İngiliz yazarlardan daha az türde yazar duruşu fiili kullanmışlardır. Bulgular İngiliz yazarlar tarafından kullanılmayan yazar duruşu fiillerinin Türk yazarlar tarafından da kullanılmadığını gösteriyor. Yazar duruşu farkındalığını arttırma alıştırmalarından sonra öğrenciler seçtikleri bir makaledeki yazar duruşu fiillerini seçmekle kalmamış, aynı zamanda yazar duruşu fiillerini tam olarak kavramış ve bu fiillerin kullanımının potansiyelinin farkına varmıştır.Anahtar Kelimeler: BAWE, akademik yazım, derlem bilim, dilbilim, yazar duruşu. Corpus linguistics has become very common among the SLA researchers and has influenced ESL/EFL education over the past few decades. Computer learner corpora, a sub-division of corpus linguistics, have been used quite often in ESL/EFL studies. In the first part of the study, usage of stance verbs in a corpus of 48 doctoral dissertations written by Turkish-speaking Academic Authors of English (TAEs) which was collected by Ağçam (2014), named TACE (Ağçam, 2014) (Turkish Academic Corpus of English), were investigated and the findings were compared against The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. WordSmith Tools software was used to count the frequencies of the stance verbs. The second part of the study incorporated educational practices. In the second part of the study there were 5 authorial stance awareness raising activity sessions to investigate that whether explicit training of stance verbs in class raises the `stance awareness of the trainees` or not.Findings in the study show that Turkish academic writers used more stance verbs than British academic writers, but English academic writers used more stance verb types. The findings of this study also show that generally verbs that were not used by the British writers were not used by the Turkish writers either. After the stance awareness activities students were able to identify the stance verbs in the paper they chose. Furthermore, students not only classified the verbs as they were taught in the first stance awareness raising activity session, but also gained a grasp of authorial stance verbs and they were aware of the potency of the usage of those verbs.Key Words: BAWE, academic writing, corpus, linguistics, authorial stance 75

In this paper, we have tried to describe the details about the strategies and methods we have adapted to design and develop a digital Odia corpus of newspaper texts. We have also attempted to identify the scopes of its utilization in different domains of Odia language technology and applied linguistics. The corpus is developed with sample news reports produced and published by some major Odia newspapers published from Bhubaneswar and neighboring places. We have followed several issues relating to text corpus design, development, and management, such as size of the corpus with regard to number of sentences and words, coverage of domains and sub-domains of news texts, text representation, question of nativity, determination of target users, selection of time span, selection of texts, amount of sample for each text types, method of data sampling, manner of data input, corpus sanitation, corpus file management, and problem of copyright. The digital corpus is basically in machine readable format, so that the text becomes easy to process very quickly. We presume that the corpus we have developed will come to a great help to look into the present texture of the language as well as to retrieve various linguistic data and information required for writing a modern grammar for Odia with close reference to its empirical identity, usage, and status. The electronic Odia corpus that we have generated can also be used in various fields of research and development activities for Odia.

This study is a corpus-based lexical study that aims to explore the use of words in Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) in journal articles in the field of applied linguistics. A 1.5 million-word corpus called the Applied Linguistics Research Articles Corpus (ALC) was created for this study. The corpus consists of 200 research articles that have been published in five applied linguistics journals, namely, Applied Linguistics , Language Learning , The Modern Language Journal , Second Language Research , and TESOL Quarterly . Results show that AWL words account for 11.17% of the entire ALC. Using both frequency and range as the criteria for word forms selection, this study identifies 475 AWL and 128 non-AWL word forms that are used more than 50 times in the ALC and at least five times across the five journals. Most of the AWL word forms belong to the word families included in Coxhead’s first and second sublists. The non-AWL word forms are specialized terms in applied linguistics, terms related to language education and research methodology, and adjectives/nouns indicating countries/languages. Pedagogical implications are made for both teachers and learners of academic English as a foreign language.

The academic Abstract genre is one of the most important parts of a research paper because it is viewed at first by readers. When well written, it enables them to quickly and accurately identify the main ideas and contributions of the work presented. Hence writing an abstract is the most difficult part. Poorly written abstracts can affect negatively the significance and understanding of the paper. In order to investigate the rhetorical moves (or communicative stages) creating the meaning of abstracts, this study analyzes a corpus of 1,500 international conference papers (ICALT) using Corpus Linguistic tools and LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) algorithm. This study shows that abstracts are written focusing on research purpose and methods rather than describing the background and commenting results. LDA algorithm provides a list of topics within the corpus of abstracts based on research areas. Future works on LDA algorithm should strengthen its semantic approach based on the rhetorical moves.