A Corpus-Based Study Of Collocational Frameworks In English Medical Research Article Introductions

English research articles have served as an essential channel and carrier for researchers to obtain new scientific knowledge and exchange their research findings. Introduction, as the opening part of a research article, performs multiple functions and is normally supposed to offer the research background and aims, to indicate the significance and necessity of the current research, and to introduce such aspects as the adopted theories, research methods, main findings, and so forth. Whether a research article can interest the reader or not is largely determined by the quality of its introduction. Consequently, it is imperative to inquire into the linguistic patterns and features of RA introductions. The complexity and importance of Introduction have attracted strong interests from linguists, who have already conducted numerous relevant studies from various perspectives. However, these studies mostly deal with RA introductions at the macroscopic level under the theoretical framework of genre analysis. Seldom do they investigate the micro collocational features via a corpus-based approach.Lexical patterns and collocation have always been the hot spot in corpus linguistics. But most of the scholars merely set their eyes on recurrent continuous word sequences or the co-occurrence relation between the node word and its collocate within the span. Discontinuous word combinations, by contrast, have not met with much attention. Denoting a framework composed of two detached words (mainly grammatical ones), collocational framework is concerned about discontinuous word combinations which have been commonly neglected in traditional lexical studies and is of great research significance.The present research follows a corpus-based research approach combined with genre analysis theories and conducts an in-depth analysis of the collocational frameworks the*of and a/an*of in the self-built Medical Research Article Introduction Corpus (MRAIC, containing1652pieces of introductions and917,977running words in all) with a special aim to investigate the following questions:1) What are the features of the collocates of the collocational frameworks?2) Whether the collocational frameworks are conditioned by the genre in the selection of their collocates?3) Whether collocational frameworks can make positive contribution to the macro constitution of the discourse and to the realization of the communicative functions in discoursal moves and steps?This research examines the collocational frameworks and their collocates from multiple angles, such as the MI value, semantic categories and functional characteristics. It is found that both the*of and a/an*of are highly selective about their collocates; and they are more or less influenced by the genre in the selection process. Moreover, collocates in each framework always share the same grammatical features and are both semantically and functionally connected. The two collocational frameworks are also indispensable to the macro construction of discourse. Spreading widely in the studied introductions, phraseological sequences containing the frameworks can promote the fulfillment of the communicative functions in the discoursal moves.People can quickly and effectively grasp the linguistic features of medical RA introductions through the investigation of collocational frameworks, which are chiefly composed of grammatical words that scatter widely in discourse. This research, therefore, can provide some academic references and help for the writing of this genre and is of certain practical importance.