Abstract
Academic-scientific phraseological units in the English language play a key role in the communication of/to experts, once they reproduce frequent and expected expressions in varied disciplines. This paper aims at identifying and analyzing the 100 non-specialized academic-scientific phraseological units (constituted of 4 words) in the English language, present in eight major fields of knowledge. The theoretical background referred to Phraseology and Corpus Linguistics. Regarding methodology, an academic corpus was compiled with more than 120 million words. The software WordSmith Tools was used for the linguistic-textual process. Through the Juilland dispersion coefficient and use coefficient, the most frequent phraseological units were identified in the academic texts. The list was eventually validated by the Wilcoxon rank sum test (α = 0.05), indicating that the phraseological units identified show a higher use in the academic communication when compared to the use in the general language. The most relevant units are ‘the case of’, ‘as a result of’ and ‘at the end of’. The list with the most functional phraseological units in the English language might provide a valuable pedagogical linguistic reference for the study of the academic genre.
Highlights
Given the relevance of the theme and the insertion of Brazilian researches in international scenario in the English language, noted by the increase of the number of versions or texts written by Brazilians, it is necessary to study and provide supporting material to researchers, teachers, students, and translators
In terms of software aid, version 5 developed by Scott (2011) of the linguistic-statistical tool WordSmith Tools (WST) was used to process the corpora textual content
After all procedures described in the methodology, we have the results and data analyses
Summary
Given the relevance of the theme and the insertion of Brazilian researches in international scenario in the English language, noted by the increase of the number of versions or texts written by Brazilians, it is necessary to study and provide supporting material to researchers, teachers, students, and translators. Language and Culture texts, Babini and Silva (2012) show that Brazilian researchers (and professionals who translated texts into English) produce texts in the English language that, from a lexical perspective, are characterized by the overuse and/or by the lack of certain expected linguistic items in scientific articles. 345-353, Oct.-Dec., 2017 to the community that uses the written English language as means of communication This way, our investigation aims to bring awareness concerning academic linguistic production, and highlight that, besides terminological and lexical common units, the academic text is constituted of phraseological units, which potentially give authenticity to the scientific article in English, fulfilling the target reader’s expectations – having common vocabulary, terminological vocabulary and typical structures of academic-scientific communication. This work is characterized by a computational-linguistic approach, accompanied by statistical calculations
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