PHRASEOLOGICAL STRUCTURES IN PAKISTANI RESEARCH DISCOURSE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND PURE SCIENCES
Keywords:
Corpus Linguistics, English for Academic Purposes (Eap), Lexical Bundles, Pakistani Ph.D. Theses, Phraseological UnitsAbstract
The current study shows how, at the lexicogrammatically level, the employment of Phraseological Units (PUs) in Pakistani Ph.D. theses of Social Sciences and Pure Sciences establishes different knowledge territories. For the structural analysis of the PUs, the study employs the structural classification of PUs proposed by Biber in 1999. Biber’s taxonomy classifies Phraseological Units into three major categories: “Noun-Phrase (NP) based,” “Preposition Phrase (PP) based,” and “Verb Phrase (VP) based.” The collected corpus data of the study comprised 100 Pakistani Ph.D. theses in total, with 50 PhD theses for each field of science, i.e., Social Sciences and Pure Sciences. The corpus size of the collected data was 5.5 million words bearing a type-token ratio (TTR) of 4.45. For the comparative analysis, with the help of AntConc 3.4.4, the 100 most frequent four-word PUs in Pakistani Ph.D. theses of Social Sciences and Pure Sciences were classified according to Biber’s taxonomy. The analysis of the structural distribution of PUs shows that in the field of Social Sciences, NP- and PP-based PUs are used more frequently as compared with the field of Pure Sciences. However, VP-based PUs is used three times more in the field of Pure Sciences than in the field of Social Sciences. Moreover, the comparative structural analysis of the subcategories of NP-, PP-, and VP-based PUs was also conducted to reveal further structural differences for the PUs used in Pure Sciences and Social Sciences. The structural differences in the use of PUs in both disciplinary sciences highlight pedagogical implications of these multi-word sequences for the development and teaching of EAP courses. It is expected that the findings of this study will aid in the development of material for academic writing and English for Academic Purposes.
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