Phraseology in English as an Academic Lingua Franca

Abstract

Under the context of English as a Lingua Franca, this chapter explores the use of English prepositional verbs in writing by Chinese university students in comparison with that by their American and British counterparts. A written learner corpus compiled by the author and four native comparable corpora were used for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The overall frequency of prepositional verbs in the five corpora shows that Chinese learners use fewer prepositional verbs in comparison with their American and British counterparts. Qualitative analysis, on the other hand, shows that Chinese learners are capable of producing an adequate number of prepositional verbs that stylistically appropriate. Moreover, differences are also found between the native novice writers in regard to both the frequency and the stylistic features of the prepositional verbs in the four native corpora. The results lead to critical discussion about the use of native corpora as the benchmark in learner corpus research.