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Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing: Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise
Edited by Ute Römer, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 95] 2020
► pp. 227–254

The use of lexical patterns in engineering

A corpus-based investigation of five sub-disciplines

| Colorado State University
| Colorado State University

Over the past decade, engineering has been one of the most oft-chosen fields of study for domestic and international students at US colleges and universities (IIE 2017; NCES 2018). As a result, the number of students in undergraduate engineering courses has steadily grown, leading to increased attention devoted to the written discourse encountered in engineering courses. The present study investigates the linguistic overlap between published textbooks used in lower-division undergraduate engineering courses by focusing on the analysis of multi-word sequences – 5-word phrase-frames – commonly found in five engineering disciplines. Overall, it was found that, while frequency distribution and structural characteristics of the identified phrase-frames were consistent across the five corpora, there were dissimilarities in the discourse functions performed by these patterns.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Multiword sequences in discipline-specific texts
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Construction of engineering corpora
    • 2.2Identification of target phrase-frames
    • 2.3Structural and functional analysis of phrase-frames
    • 2.4Overlapping of phrase-frames
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Distribution and variability of phrase-frames
    • 3.2Structural categories for phrase-frames
    • 3.3Functional categories for phrase-frames
    • 3.4Findings for overlapping PFs
  • 4.Pedagogical applications of findings
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 20 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.95.10nek
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