A Corpus-based Study Of Lexis Heterogeneity In EST Texts

With reference to Firthian linguistics, the author carried out a corpus-based study oflexis behavior heterogeneity of English near synonyms and countable nouns with singleand plural inflectional forms in particular. According to Firthian theory, lexis with thesyntagmatic combinations should be prioritized with word forms rather than their lemma asits dynamic observational focus. With this fundamental linguistic revolution, linguisticstudy should divert its direction from paradigmatic syntactical abstraction to themeaning-conveying, function-fulfilling lexis observation and generalization with itssyntagmatic orientation.As for differentiation of the near synonyms in English for Science and Technologytexts (EST texts), the Sinclairian “Extended Units of Meaning” model is elaborated andutilized with collocation, colligation and semantic preference as its specific tactics. Englishnear synonyms, with some referential meanings in common, still have their different lexisbehaviors on their linear axis, thus can not afford to replace each other under ‘in-armchair’philosopher’s proposal, but at ‘in-field’ corpus linguists’ disposal.Morphologically-based study of EST lexis heterogeneity is another focus in this paper.Countable nouns with single and plural inflectional forms have been scrutinized with theircollocational concordance lines as their environments. Despite their common collocatesthey share to serve the same thesis in general, the node lemmas with its base form andplural form have their own way of agglomerative clustering in the EST texts. The findingsshow that nouns with two inflectional forms can not be lemmatized for their subtleties oflexis behaviors.Sinclairian “Extended Unit of Meaning” model serves the research purpose wellexcept for semantic prosody’s abstraction. EST text has objectivity, originality,scientificness as its stylistic and rhetoric features, therefore, semantic prosody can not beotherwise easily abstracted pragmatically.