P-frames and rhetorical moves in applied linguistics conference abstracts
Jungwan Yoon, J. Elliott Casal · Studies in corpus linguistics · 2020
Abstract 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.