Abstract
This paper looks into the specificity of academic prose in an EFL setting. To this end, it analyzes two learner corpora (a linguistic corpus and a literary one) compiled from scientific articles in English written by Brazilian researchers and published in online journals and proceedings. The study takes into account the notions of formulaicity and novelty in language (cf. Sinclair 1991, Wray 2002) and adopts the lexical bundle (cf. Biber et al. 2004) as its unit of analysis. The computer program WordSmith Tools (Scott 1999) is used to list the most frequent lexical bundles in both research corpora, which are then classified in terms of structure and function. The results show that more innovation occurs in the literary corpus, and, consequently, fewer lexical bundles. The corpora also seem to be different once the nature of bundles is considered.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Acting and connecting |
| Subtitle of host publication | Cultural approaches to Language and Literature |
| Editors | Sonia Zyngier, Anna Chesnokova, Vander Viana |
| Place of Publication | Münster |
| Publisher | LIT Verlag |
| Pages | 139-170 |
| Publication status | Published - 2007 |
Keywords
- Corpus linguistics
- Academic prose
- Brazilian researchers
- English as a foreign language
- Lexical bundles