Exploring word associations in academic engineering texts
Given the importance of lexis in language description, this study attempts to integrate the lexical approach to describe a specialised language for teaching and learning. In addition, this paper demonstrates the use of the correspondence analysis (CA), one of the multivariate techniques, as a usef...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Pusat Pengajian Bahasa dan Linguistik, FSSK, UKM
2015
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/8502/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/8502/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/8502/1/7911-22965-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | Given the importance of lexis in language description, this study attempts to integrate the lexical approach to
describe a specialised language for teaching and learning. In addition, this paper demonstrates the use of the
correspondence analysis (CA), one of the multivariate techniques, as a useful tool to describe a language. As such,
this is a corpus-based study of verbs among academic engineering text types. A larger engineering corpus (E2C)
was constructed by combining two specialised corpora, consisting of two text types, namely reference books (RBC)
and journal articles (EJC). The Wordsmith 6 program was used to extract 30 key-key-verbs from E2C. The British
National Corpus (BNC) was used as the reference corpus. The CA was conducted with these key-key-verbs by
computing the frequency values of the verbs generated for each corpus: E2C, RBC, EJC and BNC. The findings
include the visual display of the complex inter-relationship of the verbs among the corpora, thus, demonstrating the
potential use of the CA as a tool for specialised language description. The empirical observations of the verbs may
lead to significant findings on the features of the academic engineering texts types; thus, this study promises more
well-informed future investigations into other linguistic features, rhetorical functions, and pedagogical implications
involving the academic engineering texts. |
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