A Corpus-Based Lexical Study Of Forestry English

The knowledge of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is important for researchers and learners in their own academic fields, as a result many scholars have managed to set up specialized corpora to describe ESP English. In order to depict the language of English for Forestry Purpose (EFP) in demonstrative approaches, a lexical study based on a forestry English corpus is done here. After an investigation of some professional corpora and corpus-based language researches, this study has constructed a one-million-word corpus specialized in forestry English articles which have been selected from the core forestry journals. In addition, it has worked out, via the corpus, the lexical features of forestry English including a general description, the most frequently used word families, typical vocabulary and paradigmatic relations between members of the same syntactic categories; and put forward its pedagogical implications and some suggestions for future research.The study is significant in constructing the first corpus specialized in forestry English. Besides, compared with the Brown Corpus, forestry English has been proved to be more difficult than ordinary English for readers to understand. Studies on word frequency, word families and typical vocabulary have revealed the most important vocabulary in the forestry field. Paradigmatic relations such as synonymy, hyponymy and meronymy have also been found to hold between the same syntactic categories of the key words in the corpus. These lexical studies are helpful to describe the forestry English language. Furthermore, the results of the study also present some pedagogical implications for ESP and EFP instructors and learners, especially in curriculum preparation. Teachers can choose textbooks and teaching materials in accord with the typical vocabulary, and work out exercises for synonym distinction, multiple choices and cloze by retrieving the context of a specific word through the corpus. The availability of examples of collocation can encourage students to discover the law of lexical use under the actual language environment on their own. Not only does it offer abundant materials for EFP researchers and learners, this study is also instrumental to promote the development of forestry English research and education.