| In recent years, domestic corpus researches on ESP(English for Specific Purposes) and EAP(English for Academ ic Purposes) have b ecome a hot topic in the area o f corpus linguistics. This research focuses on sem i-technical words based on Ho rticultural Research Articles Corpus. As vital com ponents in academic discourse, sem i-technical words share similar characteristics with techn ical words an d general w ords, often used as a p olysemy which combines gen eral and specific m eaning together. Semi-technical words play an important role of text or ganization and rhet orical function in academ ic discourse, which become difficult linguistic feature and an obst acle in EAP reading and writing, as well as in scientific English translation(Zhen Fengchao and W ang Hua 2014). Researches on semi-technical words in academic discourse have arisen extensive concerns among language researchers. Previous researches m ainly focused on its definition, cl assification, extraction and on testing the coverage of Coxhead’ s Academic Word List. There is less research on semi-technical word features and usage. Ev en less researches are done on features of semi-technical vocabulary by analyzing their coll ocation and colligation. Therefore, there is necessity to carry out relevant such researches, in order to understand deeply features of semi-technical words.This study aim s to de velop a sem i-technical word list(HRACWL) based on the self-built Horticultural Research Articles Corpus(H RAC), making comparison of semi-technical words’ usage in academic and general texts, so as to find out their collocation and colligation features. Horticultural Research Articles Corpus(HRAC) was built f rom three well-know SCI international journals published between 2007 and 2013 which contains 1.08 million running words, with 254 articles in total. The research tools we used are mainly corpus retrieval software(PowerConc), lexi cal analysis software(AntW ordProfiler) and colligation software(Colligator 2.0). We then developed the HRACWL. Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) is used as reference corpus.The results show that:(1) the coverage of HRACWL’s semi-technical words in HRAC is significantly higher than AWL, but slightly lower than AVL.(2) Compared with the reference corpus, on obvious dif ference of semi-technical words can be found in HRAC concerning their colligations which are characterized in the format of "NN + NN" and " DT + NN + IN + NN", but more dif ferences in collocation. The semi-technical words in academ ic discourse show high-frequency use of noun phrase and no minalization of verbs. These findings m ay bring about som e guidance and application for learners to gra sp linguistic features of semi-technical words, and to improve their writing and translation in ag ricultural academic English. |
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