Patterns And Meanings Of Textual Sentence Stems In Academic Texts

The present study, drawing on Pawley and Syder s proposal of Lexicalized Sentence Stem , sets out to explore phraseology on sentential level termed as Textual Sentence Stems, with a view to present a gamut of such lexico-grammatical expressions and discourse functions they perform in academic texts. It is a corpus-based study through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data.The data for this research is drawn from the New-JDEST corpus of six million tokens. From the prototypical lexical sequences with higher frequency, a series of textual sentence stems were extracted, and then classified into two broad pattern categories according to their subjects, namely, dummy-subject pattern and content-subject pattern. The former includes anticipatory-it, anticipatory-as, and existential-there patterns; while the latter includes patterns headed by macro discourse entity, micro discourse entity, interactive discourse entity, research participant, and interactive research participant. Within each category, a detailed analysis of patterns and meanings of each textual sentence stem and their discourse functions in academic texts has been conducted. After examining the lexical and grammatical realizations as well as their variations of the textual sentence stems, some major findings have been obtained as follows:1. Textual sentence stems of various patterns thread through the whole text, which perform an important role in organizing the text, facilitating information development, and realizing interactions with readers or discourse community members.2. A textual sentence stem can have many lexical and grammatical variations, but within certain constraints.3. Grammatical or lexical variations within the textual sentence stem can contribute to the multi-functions in realizing discourse moves.The significance of the study lies not only in the sentential perspective of phraseology research, but also in its implications for second language learning. It may help NNS students acquire a repertoire of textual sentence stems typical of academic texts, and may contribute to the improvement of their academic writing.