This paper presents the introduction of frame semantics in SciE-Lex, a lexical database of biomedical English, in order to establish frame-based semantic networks among the lexical units contained in the database and draw attention to the domain-specific meanings and syntactic patterns that they… read more
The present study looks at adverb placement in expert writing and in first-language and second-language novice spoken and written production. The extent to which first-language (L1) transfer is still present in advanced learners’ written production is also investigated. The study uses data from… read more
The aim of this paper is to explore the predominant metonymic and metaphoric conceptualizations of sadness in the Old English period. To this end, the Old English expressions for emotional distress recorded in The Old English Thesaurus and old English dictionaries have been analyzed. Taking as a… read more
This paper examines the collocational patterns of frequent verbs in medical research articles, and proposes a way to help non-native speakers of English learn word combinations frequently used in specific professional genres. We explore the correlations in the syntactico-semantic behavior and… read more
This paper presents results from a qualitative corpus-based study on Spanish EFL learners’ metaphorical production. The analysis of a learner corpus of business English, which included essays written by undergraduates, showed that learners do make use of metaphorical language and that the… read more
The present chapter provides an alternative approach to discourse analysis based on the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1993, inter alia). Unlike other studies on text structure, this paper argues that our metaphorical conceptualization of discourse… read more
It seems intuitively certain that in scientific articles, affirmative clauses far surpass negative clauses. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that there are few negative sentences in this type of written discourse. The aim of this article is to analyse negative polarity in biomedical English. By… read more
This study is a corpus-based, cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary analysis of impersonal and personal constructions in scientific texts. Passive structures (to be + past participle) and personal expressions (first-person pronouns) were extracted from a corpus of research articles taken from an… read more
This study is an investigation of the morphosyntactic, lexical and functional variation of lexical bundles in scientific writing. In this chapter, we discuss the various methodological issues involved in the analysis of the structural variability and multifunctionality of lexical bundles, and the… read more
Verdaguer, Isabel, Natalia Judith Laso, Trinidad Guzmán-González, Danica Salazar, Elisabet Comelles, Emilia Castaño Castaño and Joseph Hilferty 2013 SciE-Lex: A lexical databaseBiomedical English: A corpus-based approach, Verdaguer, Isabel, Natalia Judith Laso and Danica Salazar (eds.), pp. 21–38 | Article
This chapter deals with the main methodological issues underlying the building of the SciE-Lex lexical database and discusses and justifies the information included. SciE-Lex was initially conceived as a response to the lack of reference tools that can help scientists write scientific papers in… read more
In order to discover where pedagogical efforts need to be made in helping students to develop metaphorical competence in their writing, it is necessary to be able to show what distinguishes the kind of metaphorical language used by native and non-native speakers of the language, and if there are… read more