Table Of ContentAdvances in
Corpus-based Research
on Academic Writing
Effects of discipline, register,
and writer expertise
edited by
Ute Römer
Viviana Cortes
Eric Friginal
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95
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing
Studies in Corpus Linguistics (SCL)
issn 1388-0373
SCL focuses on the use of corpora throughout language study, the development
of a quantitative approach to linguistics, the design and use of new tools for
processing language texts, and the theoretical implications of a data-rich discipline.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
benjamins.com/catalog/scl
General Editor Founding Editor
Ute Römer Elena Tognini-Bonelli
Georgia State University The Tuscan Word Centre/University of Siena
Advisory Board
Laurence Anthony Susan Hunston
Waseda University University of Birmingham
Antti Arppe Michaela Mahlberg
University of Alberta University of Birmingham
Michael Barlow Anna Mauranen
University of Auckland University of Helsinki
Monika Bednarek Andrea Sand
University of Sydney University of Trier
Tony Berber Sardinha Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
Catholic University of São Paulo Catholic University of Leuven
Douglas Biber Elena Tognini-Bonelli
Northern Arizona University The Tuscan Word Centre/University of Siena
Marina Bondi Yukio Tono
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Jonathan Culpeper Martin Warren
Lancaster University The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Sylviane Granger Stefanie Wulff
University of Louvain University of Florida
Stefan Th. Gries
University of California, Santa Barbara
Volume 95
Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing
Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise
Edited by Ute Römer, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal
Advances in Corpus-based
Research on Academic Writing
Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise
Edited by
Ute Römer
Viviana Cortes
Eric Friginal
Georgia State University
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Cover design: Françoise Berserik
Cover illustration from original painting Random Order
by Lorenzo Pezzatini, Florence, 1996.
doi 10.1075/scl.95
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress:
lccn 2019055545 (print) / 2019055546 (e-book)
isbn 978 90 272 0506 3 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6145 8 (e-book)
© 2020 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
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John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com
Table of contents
Introduction: Advances in corpus-based research on academic writing 1
Ute Römer, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal
Part I. Focus on writer expertise and nativeness status
A corpus-based study of academic word use in EFL student writing 9
Eniko Csomay
Give constructions in Korean EFL learner writing 33
Yunjung Nam
A corpus-based exploration of constructions in written academic English
as a lingua franca 59
Selahattin Yilmaz and Ute Römer
The influence of sources on First-Year Composition L1 student writing:
A multi-dimensional analysis 89
Stephen M. Doolan
Students’ use of lexical bundles: Exploring the discipline
and writing experience interface 115
Ndeye Bineta Mbodj and Scott A. Crossley
Part II. Focus on disciplinary variation
Combining rhetorical move analysis with multi-dimensional analysis:
Research writing across disciplines 137
Bethany Gray, Elena Cotos and Jordan Smith
Lexical bundles across disciplines: A look at consistency and variability 169
Randi Reppen and Shannon B. Olson
Lexical bundles as reflections of disciplinary norms in Spanish
and English literary criticism, history, and psychology research 183
William Michael Lake and Viviana Cortes
vi Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing
Adjectives as nominal pre-modifiers in chemistry
and applied linguistics research articles 205
Deise P. Dutra, Jessica M. S. Queiroz, Luciana D. de Macedo,
Danilo D. Costa and Elisa Mattos
The use of lexical patterns in engineering:
A corpus-based investigation of five sub-disciplines 227
Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker and Anthony Becker
Stance in unpublished student writing: An exploratory study
of modal verbs in MICUSP’s Physical Science papers 255
Kimberly Becker and Hui-Hsien Feng
Part III. Focus on register variation
P-frames and rhetorical moves in applied linguistics conference abstracts 281
Jungwan Yoon and J. Elliott Casal
Stand-alone literature reviews: A new multi-dimensional analysis 307
Heidi R. Wright
A multi-dimensional view of collocations in academic writing 333
Maria Carolina Zuppardi and Tony Berber Sardinha
Name index 355
Subject index 357
Introduction
Advances in corpus-based research
on academic writing
Ute Römer, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal
Georgia State University
As its title indicates, the present volume showcases recent advances in corpus-based
research on academic writing. This topic emerged as a central theme at the 14th
conference of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics (AACL), held at
Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA in September 2018. The editors of the vol-
ume (who also served as organizers of AACL 2018) invited authors who had pre-
sented work on this topic at the conference to submit proposals for inclusion in the
present volume. Written by a mix of established and up-and-coming researchers,
the selected contributions show applications of innovative corpus-based methodol-
ogies, replicate earlier studies to validate methodological procedures, investigate ac-
ademic registers rarely analyzed using corpus-based methods before, and compare
the linguistic production of different groups of academic writers against each other.
What we consider particularly novel aspects of the collection are the inclusion of
research that combines rhetorical moves with multi-dimensional analysis, work
that incorporates textual position analyses of frequent items across disciplines and
languages, studies that cover both fixed and variable phraseological items (lexical
bundles, phrase-frames, constructions), and research that is based on corpora of
English as an academic lingua franca.
Gray (2015) states that the written language of academia has distinct charac-
teristics that make it different from other types of language, and a vast number of
studies from varied areas in the field of applied linguistics that used very different
research methodologies have proven this statement right (see for example, Biber
1988; Crompton 1997; Flowerdew 2002; Grabe & Kaplan 1997; Halliday & Martin
1993; Hyland 2000, among many others). Over the past two decades, corpus-based
methodologies have been favored in the analysis of a wide variety of written regis-
ters frequently produced in academia because these methodologies provide reliable
and generalizable findings that yield applications that help complete the description
of these registers and, in many cases, can have direct pedagogical applications.
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.95.int
© 2020 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Ute Römer, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal
Recent studies like the ones reported in Biber & Gray (2016), Cao & Hu (2014),
Gray (2015), Kopaczyk & Tyrkkö (2018), and Parkinson (2013), to mention only a
few examples, used corpus-based research methodologies to identify and analyze
linguistic phenomena in written academic registers. These studies range from fo-
cusing on metadiscourse markers and disciplinary and research paradigm linguistic
variation to analyses of grammatical features of complexity and elaboration. The
large numbers of corpus-based studies that have been published in books, edited
volumes, and peer-reviewed journals have helped provide a thorough description
of the lexico-grammatical features of academic registers (see for example, Gray
2015: 15–18, for a summary of studies of language use in academic research arti-
cles). There is, however, still a lot of unexplored territory in this area – a gap that
the contributions to this volume attempt to address.
The studies included in this volume are based on a wide range of corpora
spanning first (L1) and second language (L2) academic writing at different levels
of writing expertise, containing texts from a variety of academic disciplines (and
sub-disciplines), and of different academic registers. These three areas of focus
(writer expertise and L1 status, disciplinary variation, register variation) provide
the organization of the volume and the division of its 14 chapters into three parts.
Part I of the volume focuses on which effects writer expertise and nativeness
status of the writer can have on academic writing. It starts with two chapters that
focus on second language (L2) learner writing in academic settings, the first one
entitled “A corpus-based study of academic word use in EFL student writing” and
written by Eniko Csomay. Based on a corpus of writing assignments collected in
a dual-degree program in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathe-
matics) in Tbilisi, Georgia, Csomay traces progress in students’ writing by quan-
tifying their use of academic vocabulary. The second chapter by Yunjung Nam on
“Give constructions in Korean EFL learner writing” draws on data from the Yonsei
English Learner Corpus (YELC; Rhee & Jung 2014) and the Michigan Corpus of
Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP; Römer & O’Donnell 2011) as it discusses
dominant patterns in the use of constructions of the high-frequency verb give by
L1 Korean novice academic writers compared to L1 English novice writers. Nam’s
study highlights aspects of English lexicogrammar that L1 Korean novice academic
writers struggle with and has important implications for academic writing pedagogy
in a Korean EFL setting. Also focusing on lexicogrammatical patterns is Selahattin
Yilmaz and Ute Römer’s chapter on “A corpus-based exploration of constructions
in written academic English as a lingua franca.” Using a corpus of English as a lingua
franca (ELF) writing produced in academic settings and a subset of academic writ-
ing from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies 2008–)
as a reference dataset, the authors demonstrate how a combined key function word
and phraseological analysis can lead to the identification of constructions that are
Introduction 3
characteristic of written academic ELF. Next in Part I of the volume is a chapter by
Stephen Doolan on “The influence of sources on first-year composition L1 student
writing: A multidimensional analysis”. With the help of a multi-dimensional anal-
ysis and a corpus of student essays, Doolan highlights core aspects of source-based
language use by English as a first language novice academic writers. His study allows
us to better understand the complex task of referencing and has practical implica-
tions for first-year composition teachers and students. The final chapter of Part I of
the volume entitled “Students’ use of lexical bundles: Exploring the discipline and
writing experience interface” is written by Ndeye Bineta Mbodj and Scott Crossley.
The authors use a variety of corpora of novice and expert writing in medical and
non-medical fields to investigate in what ways and to what extent academic writing
expertise and field-specific knowledge contribute to the production of medical lex-
ical bundles. With its concentration on medical English, the Mbodj and Crossley
chapter serves as a bridge between the first part and the second part of the collection
which focuses on disciplinary variation.
The chapters in Part II of the volume highlight how academic writing may
differ based on the discipline or sub-discipline texts come from. First up, Bethany
Gray, Elena Cotos and Jordan Smith’s contribution entitled “Combining rhetor-
ical move analysis with multi-dimensional analysis: Research writing across dis-
ciplines” is methodologically particularly interesting. It shows how two analytic
techniques that are commonly used in academic writing research can be integrated
to provide valuable new insights into the mapping of communicative functions and
linguistic patterns in research articles from a wide range of disciplines. Informed
by the results of their study, the authors also argue for further required adapta-
tions of multi-dimensional analysis for use with move-annotated data. Next, Randi
Reppen and Shannon Olson in their chapter entitled “Lexical bundles across dis-
ciplines: A look at consistency and variability”, discuss both discipline-specific
and cross-disciplinary fixed bundles, as well as bundles with variable slots (also
known as phrase-frames), in a large corpus of course readings from nine disci-
plines (Architecture, Business, Culinary Science, Digital Arts, Fashion Design,
Film, Hospitality Industry, Interior Design, and Studio Arts). The authors high-
light the value of especially those bundles they identified as “cross-disciplinary”
in pedagogical contexts and share practical activities that may promote awareness
of lexical bundles for students and teachers. Also focusing on lexical bundles and
sharing insights of pedagogical relevance, the chapter by William Lake and Viviana
Cortes on “Lexical bundles as reflections of disciplinary norms in Spanish and
English literary criticism, history, and psychology research” illuminates aspects of
humanities and social sciences writing in two world languages. Access to parallel
corpora of research articles in English and Spanish allowed the authors to not only
analyze disciplinary but also cross-linguistic variation in lexical bundles which
