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Article published In:
Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 31:2 (2018) ► pp.660–685

Identifying verb collocational patterns in a specialized medical journal corpus

A pedagogical approach to phraseology

| University of Barcelona
| Kobe Gakuin University

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 the collocational patterns of related verbs, in order to systematically teach recurrent word combinations.To this end, we present a corpus-based analysis of the collocational patterning of the verbs which belong to the same semantic frame in FrameNet, the frame EVIDENCE. These verbs were identified in 397 medical research articles from a pre-release version of the PERC (Professional English Research Consortium) corpus (3,155,118 tokens and 115,960 word types). The verbs examined, in approximate order of degree of increasing certainty, are suggest, argue, show, reveal, prove, demonstrate, substantiate, verify, confirm and corroborate. The results reveal that verbs that can be grouped into semantic and syntactic coherent sets also share combinatorial properties. We conclude that, rather than studying isolated verbs, making learners aware of these patterns of verb groups can greatly contribute toward efficient learning of the language of professional texts.

Keywords: phraseology, PERC Corpus of Professional English, FrameNet, verb combinations, collocational patterns
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.FrameNet
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions: Implications for teaching
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.16019.ver
References

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