On The Phraseological Features Of English Introduction In Textile Science Articles

This study is a corpus-based investigation of phraseological sequences in the introduction subcorpus of the Donghua Textile Academic Article Corpus, with an aim to characterizing their prominent formal patterns and functional features.Within Altenberg's framework of phraseology, this study investigates three types of lexical sequences:full clauses, clause constituents and incomplete phrase. The investigation reveals that the incomplete phrases account for the largest proportion, and the clause constituents represent a second largest proportion, and no full clauses exist. Therefore, our immediate concern in this study is on the highly recurrent PSs of incomplete phrases and clause constituents, focusing on their distribution and collocational behavior through a thorough microscopic analysis.According to statistics, the incomplete phrases take a large share of the whole data, and can be well divided into the following eight pattern forms:the+N+of, a/an+N+of Det+N+of,Prep+the+N+of,it+(Model/Aux)+Be+Adj+that, it+(Model/Aux)+Be+V-ed+that, it+(Model/Aux)+Be+Adj/V-ed+Prep, N+(Model/Aux)+Be+Adj/V-ed+Prep. In terms of prominent formal patterns, the incomplete phrases are visually displayed in frameworks of the nominal patterns the_of a/an_ of etc.. And also the framework of it is/was+clause deserves a good notice, because not only it is a large proportion, but also it owns its distinct features within each rhetorical section of the research article (Chris Gledhill). The clause constituents account for the second largest proportion, realized by fixed/semi-fixed idiomatic patterns, with the single clause constituents being complete phrase accompanied by the grammatical word. The formation character of clause constituents is that almost all of its thematic springboard are highly routinized clauses and are mainly comprised by the close-class words, discourse items, and discourse connectors. Meanwhile, the prepositional cores include the open-class words and also are relatively routinized.The functional features of the phraseological sequences are concluded as follows. First, the incomplete phrase serves as an obligatory component in grammatical structure, without which there would be no sentence at all. The other salient features of incomplete phrases are their academic-oriented wording characteristics in the whole text and their pertinence to the description of filed-specific activities. And the collocates of the intermediate words, which tend to be more research-oriented normalized forms of related verbs, also prove this phenomena even if they are not fully formulaic expressions, they reveal the conventional ways of conveying specific propositional meanings in academic papers, as they are generally falling into the three categories that function as specifying the textile science processes and actions alike, identifying entities conditions and purpose of academic researches, demonstrating the attributes. Second, the multiple clause constituents perform variant discourse functions. The single clause constituents commonly serve as vagueness tags, intensifiers/quantifiers, discourse connectors, temporal expressions, spatial expressions, and purposive expressions.This study has presented collocational patterns and their semantic or functional features of EAP article introductions. Collocational patterns indicate a wider relationship beyond the individual text and reflect an evolutionary process that has forged the conventions of a number of phrases in EAP articles. The research, therefore, will possibly have implications for EAP research, and EAP teaching and learning.