The next meeting of the Edge Hill corpus Research Group will take place online (via Teams) on Thursday 11 January 2024, 2:00-3:00 pm (UK time).
Attendance is free. You can register here: https://store.edgehill.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/conferences/events/edge-...
Registration closes on Wednesday 10 January, 12 noon (UK time)
Topics: Corpus Methodology, Phraseology
Speaker: Benet Vincenthttps://www.coventry.ac.uk/life-on-campus/staff-directory/arts-and-humanities/benet-vincent/ (Coventry University, UK)
Title: Methodological issues and challenges in the use of phrase-frames to investigate phraseology
Abstract The importance of gaining a better understanding of phraseology has been recognised for some time now in the area of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). A widespread approach is to extract from a corpus frequently-occurring fixed strings (lexical bundles, or clusters) of potentially useful phrases/multi-word units (see e.g. Gilmore and Millar's 2018). A limitation of this sort of study is the focus on fixed continuous sequences when phrases are well-known to allow a degree of variation (see e.g. Gries, 2008). One proposal to address this limitation is the 'phrase frame' (p-frame), a fixed sequence of items occurring frequently in a corpus with one or two empty slots (Lu, Yoon & Kisselev, 2021). This approach allows researchers to retrieve the most frequent p-frames in a particular corpus, then identify which items typically fill these slots and what meanings / functions might be associated with them. The idea is that the results of such research can help us better understand how members of a specific discourse community typically express themselves, which in turn may inform EAP pedagogy (Lu, Yoon, & Kisselev, 2018). Our project aimed to use a p-frame approach to create a list of pedagogically useful phrases to help novice writers of RA introductions in Health Sciences. A number of studies have used a p-frame approach with similar aims though for different discipline areas, including Fuster-Márquez and Pennock-Speck (2015), Cunningham (2017) and Lu et al., (2018, 2021). However, analysis of these studies indicates that they lack consensus on a number of issues central to p-frame methodology, presenting a challenge for new work in this area. This presentation will provide an overview of the key issues in p-frame research which we have identified and show how we have addressed them. The main aim will be to underline the importance of ensuring that the methods applied by a p-frame study align with the aims of the project.
References
Cunningham, K. J. (2017). A phraseological exploration of recent mathematics research articles through key phrase frames. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 25, 71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2016.11.005 Fuster-Márquez, M., & Pennock-Speck, B. (2015). Target frames in British hotel websites. International Journal of English Studies, 15(1), 51-69. https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes/2015/1/213231 Gilmore, A., & Millar, N. (2018). The language of civil engineering research articles: A corpus-based approach. English for Specific Purposes, 51, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2018.02.002 Gries, S. (2008). Phraseology and linguistic theory. In Phraseology: An interdisciplinary perspective, S. Granger & F. Meunier (eds.), 3-26. Lu, X., Yoon, J., & Kisselev, O. (2018). A phrase-frame list for social science research article introductions. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 36, 76-85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2018.09.004 Lu, X., Yoon, J., & Kisselev, O. (2021). Matching phrase-frames to rhetorical moves in social science research article introductions. English for Specific Purposes, 61, 63-83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2020.10.001
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