Abstract
Multiword expressions are a contiguous series of words in a text. This study examines the phraseological profile based on multiword expressions in argumentative writings in a 120,000-word collection of nonnative prospective university students’ writing. The profile is compared with two sets of American university students’ writing from two corpora that comprise upper-level American university students’ course papers and argumentative essay texts. The data are investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of the structure (i.e., noun, verb, and prepositional phrases) and function (i.e., stance, referential, and text organizer). The results show some noticeable differences among these sets of writing. The Korean student writers heavily relied on verb phrase-based expressions (e.g., are a lot of) in their writing whereas the American students preferred noun phrases. Functionally, the Korean writers underused referential function expressions (e.g., the idea of the) compared to their counterparts. In addition, the prospective Korean university students’ writing was found to represent the widest range of multiword expressions whereas the American students’ argumentative course papers exhibited the smallest range. The findings suggest that prospective Korean university students’ writing tends to use more features of verbal conversation while American university students’ writing exhibits features of structured argumentative writing. The implications for teaching writing and limitations of the study are discussed.
Highlights
Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a contiguous series of words in a text
The data comprise three sets: argumentative essays collected from a university in South Korea and argumentative subsets from two existing corpora—namely, the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP)
As negligible differences were found between the type and token distribution, for the convenience of the presentation, the study only reports the results of the MWE type analyses
Summary
Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a contiguous series of words in a text. They are referred to as multi-word constructions [1], phrases, units, sequences, or bundles [2]. MWEs are considered an indicator of a writer’s competence; they have received much attention. Due to the sheer number of units, computational techniques and resources are commonly used to examine these units. The electronic collection of linguistic data, have been indispensable in researching a large number of MWEs. Whereas corpora have generally been exploited to identify and analyze patterns of a language in a large-scale study of diachronic and synchronic patterns [3,4,5], a number of recent
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
