On The Analysis Of Wh-words In Technical English

Technical English has its own linguistic characteristics that make it a special register of English. This paper is to analyze the semantic and syntactic functions of wh-words in technical English that is represented by the corpus T4. A word can not be studied separately from its context. Thus, in this paper, wh-words are dealt with in different clauses with the focus on nominal clauses. Through the analysis of distribution frequency of wh-words in T4, some wh-words occur more in some types of clauses while some other words occur less. From the results of chi-square tests, we can come to the conclusion that the distributions of some wh-words in nominal clauses such as what are significantly different from the other corpora involved but some other wh-words show similar distribution in different corpora.