From lexical bundles to lexical frames: uncovering the extent of phraseological variation in academic writing
The contextual knowledge of a word is closely related to the knowledge of phraseological sequences as words are often used in the phraseological forms, either continuous or discontinuous. Much has been done to examine the continuous phraseological sequences for various purposes. However, studies o...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2019
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13989/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13989/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13989/1/31721-104116-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | The contextual knowledge of a word is closely related to the knowledge of phraseological sequences as words
are often used in the phraseological forms, either continuous or discontinuous. Much has been done to examine
the continuous phraseological sequences for various purposes. However, studies on phraseology often overlook
the potentially useful discontinuous phraseological sequences that allow for more flexible and productive use of
language forms. To bridge the gap in phraseology studies, this study therefore employed a corpus-driven
approach to analyse the characteristics of a form of discontinuous phraseological sequence, namely lexical
frames in a one-million-word corpus of research articles in International Business Management (IBM). The
characteristics of lexical frames were observed in four aspects: the degrees of variability and predictability of
lexical frames, the structures as well as the variable slot fillers of lexical frames. The corpus tool, Collocate 1.0
was used to extract three- and four-word lexical bundles while kfNgram was used to extract three- and fourword
lexical frames from the lexical bundles. The results revealed that three-word lexical frames are more
prevalent in IBM. The degree of variability analysis indicated that there are more fixed lexical frames in the
category of three-word lexical frames compared to the four-word category. In terms of the degree of
predictability, the category of four-word lexical frames contains more predictable lexical frames than the threeword
category. Also, most lexical frames are function word frames and the lexical frames are mostly filled up by
content words rather than function words. This study contributes to the understanding of phraseological
variation in academic writing. |
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