Siaw-Fong Chung F. Y. August Chao
National Chengchi UniversityAbstract
Recent corpus-based studies have shifted from lexical to pattern analysis (Hunston &
Francis, 1999). Adopting Biber et al.’s (2004) lexical bundle framework, this paper utilizes a self-compiled dissertation corpus and investigates the preposition-containing lexical bundles or idiomatic expressions found within this corpus. The possibility of a slot to be filled by any word was calculated so that the level of lexical bundleness can be measured.
1.0 Introduction
Lexical bundles are fixed sequences of words or ‘multi-word sequences’ which are found in specific registers such that in university teaching (spoken) and textbook (written), as was inspected in Biber et al. (2004). Biber (2009) examined several fillers in lexical bundles such as [the * of the] in academic prose. He compared the words in the of the asterisk slots which might be filled by similar or different nouns when different prepositions were concerned (e.g., at the *of, on the * of, it the * of, and to the * of). Under a similar framework yet different intention, this paper focuses on several preposition-containing lexical bundles such as according to, away from, in
accordance with, etc. which are tagged as idiomatic expressions in a part-of-speech
bundles and idiomatic expressions found in the writing of dissertation abstracts.1 Using a dissertation corpus produced by students in Taiwan, these lexical bundles were examined in terms of their fixedness or (‘lexical bundlessness’) in the register.
The study also investigates how fixed expressions as such might or might not appear in the economic register.
2.0 Literature Review
Academic writing, especially dissertation writing, demands a writing flow in a certain format. For example, Dudley-Evans (1999) believes that a standard dissertation structure includes introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion. In investigating both the M.A. and Ph.D. dissertation structures, Paltridge (2002) found that in addition to the aforementioned standard format (called traditional-simple in Paltridge’s study), other models (e.g.,
traditional-complex, topic-based, and compilation of research articles) were also
commonly found in theses and all these models have slightly different organizations from that of the traditional-simple. No matter what the model is, the systematic structures of a dissertation indicate that dissertations should be presented in a logical way. That is, a good dissertation writer is capable of digesting theories of related issues and presenting his own arguments in a systematic way.In Taiwan, several dissertations have shown interest in examining prepositions, although they mostly attempt to discern the relatedness between their spatial and temporal meanings. Cheng [鄭碧燕] (2006) is a study that has investigated EFL students’ performance by using in, on, and at, as spatial and temporal prepositions in prepositional phrases (He lives at 87 Nanking Road) and as particles (My house
which is based on multiple-choice questionnaires, shows that there are several factors affecting the selection of prepositions by learners, among which are: L1 (i.e., Mandarin) interference, confusion of the different prepositions and the existing concepts of noun phrases following the prepositions. In a different study, Ho [何宜蓁]
(2007) focuses on in and on only, aiming to introduce a polysemous network in teaching prepositions. This research lasted two months, involving two groups of subjects in which one was taught using the polysemous-network approach, while the other group received instructions through the images of senses without being introduced their relatedness. Though the statistical result did not differ significantly, a follow-up investigation showed that learners in the polysemous-network group were able to retain the network knowledge longer and better. Such comparisons of teaching approaches have also been seen in Hsu [許雅惠] (2005) who conducted a study on senior high school students – comparing instructions given using a cognitive semantic approach versus a traditional preposition. In a recent study, too, Tang [唐建樑] (2009) analyzes the preposition on from a syntactic perspective. The researcher adopts Littlefield’s (2006) Prepositional Domain as the syntactic criterion to classify prepositions in order to investigate learners’ use of preposition-like elements, including (prepositional) adverbs, particles, and true prepositions (termed as P-forms in this study) in verb-particle constructions (e.g. depend on and get on) with the aim to reveal the cause of difficulty through error analysis. In another work, Liao and Fukuya (2004), who claim that avoidance behavior is a manifestation of interlanguage development, discover three main factors that may influence Chinese learners’
avoidance behavior in producing phrasal verbs, namely learners’ proficiency level, the types of phrasal verbs, and the test types. Therefore, the importance of distinguishing the types of phrasal verbs has also been noted by other studies in different ways.
abstracts, the foremost part of dissertations. Dissertation abstracts, knowingly, should possess all the requirements of summary writing which are being condensed and precise. Cooley and Lewkowicz (2003: 112) state the following about dissertation abstract.
[Dissertation abstract] is written after the research has been completed and the writer knows exactly what is contained in the body of the text. It is a summary of the text and it informs readers of what can be found in the dissertation and in what order, functioning as an overall signpost for the reader. Although it is the last part of a dissertation to be written, it is generally one of the first a reader will look at. Indeed, if the Abstract is now well written, it may be the only part of the dissertation a reader will look at!
Paltridge and Starfield (2007: 156) also state that the typical structure of an dissertation abstract should contain (a) overview of the study; (b) aim of the study; (c) reason for the study; (d) methodology used in the study; and (e) findings of the study.
In recent years, studies of lexical bundles in academic writing have been found.
For examples, Lee and Chen (2009) created a learner corpus through collecting seventy-eight dissertations of Chinese undergraduates whose majors were either linguistics or applied linguistics. They compared this learner corpus with a collection of published journal articles (e.g. TESOL Quarterly and Applied linguistics), whose topics were selected to match those of the Chinese learners’ works. They identified some common lexical bundles with which learners of English might encounter problems when they wrote academic research. One lexical bundle frequently used to
to instruct…, was seldom found in experts’ writing and was often paraphrased into the
following alternative, Teacher talk can be used to instruct…(Nunan, 1991:189) (p.290). This indicates that according to is over-used by learners of English than by native speakers. In a different study, Cortes (2004) identifies and compares lexical bundles found in history and biology by published authors and university students.
The result demonstrates that typical bundles used in published academic writing (e.g.