Developing Resources for the Study of Phraseological Sophistication

Details

Supervisors

Paquot, Magali

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en linguistique, à finalité spécialisée: Linguistics and its Applications for a Multilingual Society

Abstract

This study is dedicated to the development of the New Academic Collocation List (NACL). The NACL is designed for research purposes, especially for examining the phraseological competence of writings by L2 EFL learners. Extracted from the selected 9 disciplines of the Louvain Corpus of Research Articles which contains approximately 18 million tokens covering a wide range of disciplines of social sciences and humanities, the new list focuses on three syntactic dependencies (i.e., adjectival modifiers, adverbial modifiers, and direct object) and the constructs of frequency and dispersion due to a lack of measuring phraseological sophistication by these constructs. Finally, the New Academic Collocation List (NACL) contains 3,756 collocations (1,497 amod collocations, 1361 advmod collocations, and 898 dobj collocations). Compared to the Academic Collocation List (ACL; Ackermann and Chen, 2013), the NACL has the following two most prominent features. First, the NACL is a larger collocation list. The NACL contains 3,756 collocations whereas the ACL contains 2,496 collocations. Second, the NACL contains a larger coverage. In the LOCRA where the NACL is extracted from, the coverage of the NACL is three times that of the ACL. The New Academic Collocation List serves as a valuable tool for assessing phraseological sophistication in academic English and supports the advancement of language research and pedagogy in this domain. Its comprehensive coverage and alignment with current language usage make it an indispensable resource for researchers, seeking to examine the phraseological sophistication of EFL writings.