General lexis in specialized genre: a corpus study on formulaic language in business reports

• Main Authors: Chen, Chun Hung, 陳俊宏
• Other Authors: Chang, Claire H. H.
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/5688yx

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學研究所 === 101 === This study aims to apply corpus method on filtering out language content for ESP course. Following Dudley-Evans and St John’s (1998) idea of real content, this thesis focuses on locating general lexis from different genres. For this study, general lexis is viewed as common words and formulaic language composed with common words. In this project, common words are extracted from a homemade Business Reports Corpus (BRC) with reference to Senior High English Wordlist for Reference (SHEWR) [高中英文參考詞彙表] and Chinese–English Translation of Important Accounting Terms [重要會計用語中英對照] in Taiwan, also with notions of corpus linguistics including keyness and text coverage. Then with number of extracted common words being compared to the total amount of SHEWR, practicality of SHEWR applied in business genre is measured and a subset word bank of SHEWR is identified to link instruction of English of General Purpose to that of English of Specific Purposes in the context of Taiwan. Secondly, formulaic language is regarded as multi-word units composed with previously extracted common words. Instead of Mutual Information, t-score, or lexical bundles, Danielsson’s (2007) method of cumulative frequency is adopted to locate formulaic language. Cross-genre analyses on formulaic language identified from BRC, Subdivision A of Brown Corpus (texts of reportage) and Subdivision H of Brown Corpus (official documents) are conducted to verify whether composition of formulaic language is correlated with types of genre, which may affect description of phraseology as well as practice of the English teaching method Lexical Approach (Lewis, 2000). This thesis has successfully demonstrated that the corpus method is a handy and efficient approach for ESP practitioners to sort out language content for instruction. One by-product of this study is that the difficulty level (as designated in SHEWR) of extracted common words is attached to allow further investigation together with data of text coverage and overall frequency.