A Corpus-Based Study Of Lexical Chunks Inenglish Energyresearch Articleabstracts

Lexical chunks are the important component of phraseology. The research of lexical chunks plays a vital part in the development of the corpus linguistics. As an indispensable element of fluent linguistic production, lexical chunks are the core of the multiword expressions. The blossom of corpus-based approach provides a new method for researchers to explore corpus linguistics by virtue of an objective frequency-based method.English research article is a substantial channel for researcher to reveal their latest findings. As a significant part of the research article, abstract is the bridge for readers to learn about the research issues and basic content efficiently. The researchers have conducted various studies from different perspectives of view both at home and abroad.The present study adopts the corpus-based approach on the basis of sub-corpus of Dong Hua University English for Science and Technology Corpus (DHEST)—Corpus of English Abstracts of Energy Research Articles (CEAERA). Utilizing the software of KfNgram and Wordsmith4.0, the thesis mainly focuses on the quantitative analysis of the word frequency of the lexical chunks, extracting the frequent lexical chunks from3words,4words, and5words respectively. The extracted results will be artificially filtered to get the core data used for the study. The thesis primarily examines and analyzes the forms, functions and linguistic features of the most frequent lexical chunks in research article abstracts based on the CEAERA with241,463words. The thesis classifies the high-frequency lexical chunks into three categories with reference to Altenberg’s framework. Besides, the thesis analyzes the functional features of lexical chunks from3words,4words, and5words according to the three-dimensional model of discourse functions put forward by Li Jingjie. The thesis studies the linguistic features of the lexical chunks to examine the functions of the chunks in the construction of the whole discourse, aiming to offer academic guidance and references for the research articles abstracts.