Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 應用英文系碩士班 === 100 === Corpus-based studies have been widely applied to explore linguistic features in
different ways. This paper aims to investigate the authentic occurrences and patterns of academic vocabulary in Taiwan and English linguistics journals by a corpus-based analysis. Linguistics articles published by various English departments in Taiwan comprise the target corpus, Taiwan-based Journal Corpus (TJC) while foreign articles from Applied Linguistics comprise Applied Linguistics Corpus (APC) for contrastive analysis. The Academic Word List (AWL) created by Coxhead (2000) is used as the criteria for identification of the academic vocabulary in the corpus. This study addresses (1) What type of AWL vocabulary occurs in TJC and APC? (2) What are the academic verbs in TJC and APC? (3) What patterns and functions do high-frequency academic verbs display and are they used in the two corpora similar? Firstly, the data analysis shows high occurrences of academic vocabulary in both corpora. This not only asserts the value of the AWL but also reveals academic English proficiency in Taiwan. Two types of academic verbs then were examined after lemmatization. Type 1 verbs are verbs per se while Type 2 verbs have dual function as verbs or nouns. The top 10 Type 1 verbs cover indicate, involve, identify, require, occur, investigate, participate, reveal, demonstrate, and select whereas the top 10 Type 2 verbs are research, process, focus, structure, comment, issue, function, design, feature and approach. Such academic verbs with their counterparts in APC were investigated in detail in terms of congruity between the two corpora. The results report that each verb has a distinctive form that often is used. In general, for Type 1 verbs, the past form outnumbers other three forms which are base form, present form and progressive form, but for Type 2 verbs, the base form is the most salient. Moreover, separate past form functions vary from verbs. Some fixed patterns are also found related with various verbs. In particular, Type 2 verbs have a strong tendency to be nouns in academic writing. As a whole, the results reveal that there is no significant discrepancy between TJC and APC. Finally, it is suggested (1) The AWL is valuable for academic writing that can be employed more in EAP teaching/learning, (2) A large-scale academic vocabulary database including collocation can be established and promoted to lift academic English proficiency level in Taiwan.
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