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Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing: Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise
Edited by Ute Römer-Barron, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 95] 2020
► pp. 281–306

P-frames and rhetorical moves in applied linguistics conference abstracts

| The Pennsylvania State University
| The Pennsylvania State University

This chapter examines the use of formulaic phrase frames (p-frames) in the rhetorical construction of Applied Linguistics Conference Abstracts (CAs). We consider both the distribution of p-frames across rhetorical moves/steps and the strength of the association of p-frames with individual moves/steps in 625 accepted AAAL 2017 CAs, all freely available on the organization’s website. We manually tagged the corpus for rhetorical moves/steps and identified p-frames of 5 and 6 words (29 per million threshold) using kfNgram (Fletcher 2012). Results highlight that p-frames play a prominent role in the realization of CA writers’ rhetorical goals both in the prevalence of p-frame use (roughly 1.7 instances per text in our data) and in the close relationship that many p-frames exhibit with particular rhetorical functions.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Corpus
    • 2.2Procedures
      • 2.2.1Rhetorical move analysis
      • 2.2.2Identification of p-frames
      • 2.2.3Mapping p-frames to rhetorical moves
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1The distribution of p-frames across the rhetorical move-steps
    • 3.2The association of p-frames with individual rhetorical moves/steps
  • 4.Summary and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 20 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.95.12yoo
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