Key Lexical Chunks in Article Abstracts of 30 Applied Linguistics Journals
Hadi Farjami · 2014
In any discourse domain, certain chunks are particularly frequent and deserve attention by the novice to be initiated and by the expert to maintain a sense of community. To make a relevant contribution to the awareness about appl ied linguistics texts and discourse, this study attempt ed to develop lists of lexical chunks frequently used in the abst racts of applied linguistics journals. The abstracts from al l the issues of 30 applied linguistics journals which were publishe d before August 1, 2013 were collected. These abstracts whic h generated a corpus of 2,750,000 words were submitted to the program AntConc for chunk extraction. The long list of chunks in the output was shortlisted based on frequ ency and inclusiveness of shorter chunks. These were classif ied into textual and content n-grams. The article also prese nts the frequent chunks which serve as starting points in b ringing up different aspects of research reports. The practica l value of the results is briefly discussed at the end of the arti cle.