Towards a genre-based approach to the

lexicographical treatment of phraseology in

electronic monolingual learner's dictionaries

Abstract : Corpus-based studies of academic writing have shown that "there is a

shared scientific voice or 'phraseological accent' (Gledhill, 2000: 204) which leads
academic writing to polarise around a number of genre-specific recurrent word
combinations and collocations (cf. Cowie, 1997; Howarth, 1998; Biber et al., 1999;
Curado Fuentes, 2001; Pecman, 2004). Lexical verbs are an essential component of
academic discourse: they are used "to discuss matters lying at the very heart of the
scholarly process" (Meyer, 1997: 368) and enable writers to modulate their ideas
and position their work in relation to other members of the discipline. However, they
create a minefield of difficulties for non-native writers (e.g. Hinkel, 2002), who have
to deal with the fact that each lexical verb has its own preferred lexico-grammatical
company in academic discourse, viz. subjects ('this study shows that'; 'the evidence
suggests that'; 'these results suggest that'), objects ('SUPPORT the view /
hypothesis that ', 'PROVIDE evidence / information') and adverbs ('DIFFER
significantly'; 'VARY considerably / widely'; 'APPLY equally'; 'closely related'; 'widely
used'; 'generally accepted') and tend to appear in routinized structures ('as
discussed in'; 'there is (no, some, little) evidence that', 'it should be noted that') (cf.
Granger & Paquot, 2008). Monolingual learners' dictionaries (MLDs) have recently
taken "more proactive steps to help learners negotiate known areas of difficulty"
(Rundell, 1999: 47), to the point that they are now conceived as comprehensive
writing tools. They now include productively oriented information in areas such as
syntactic behaviour, synonymy, register preferences and prevention of errors (cf.
Gilquin et al., 2007: 325). With the advent of electronic MLDs, space is no longer an
issue and more attention has been paid to word combinations. Lexical entries often
include collocation boxes or phrase banks. These new features, however, are usually
based on huge general English corpora including various genres (e.g. journalese,
fiction). In this paper, I investigate the usefulness of the phraseological information
available in electronic MLDs for academic writing. The study focuses on the
phraseology of a set of verbs that is particularly prominent in academic writing, i.e.
verbs of 'evidence' (e.g. 'illustrate', 'suggest', 'support') as categorized in FrameNet.
Using the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2004), I conduct a co-occurrence analysis
of these verbs in the 'Corpus of Academic Journal Articles', i.e. a 90 million word
corpus of research articles published in peer-reviewed journals (cf. Kosem, 2010).
The results are compared with the collocations listed for these verbs in the CD-
ROMs of the 'Big Five' (CALD, COBUILD, LDOCE, MEDAL and OALD) to assess the
coverage of academic collocations. Preliminary findings indicate that electronic
MLDs could do much better. A number of word combinations that have essential
discourse functions in academic writing are missing from the 'Big Five'. More
importantly perhaps, academic collocations are listed along with other word
combinations that are not typical of academic writing. Non-native writers can be
seriously misled by this presentation of collocations as they are not given any help
to decide which collocations are most appropriate in academic writing. Put
differently, the treatment of phraseology in electronic MLDs makes non-native
writers believe that all collocations and phrases are

good for all purposes (e.g. writing a research article or a short story, writing a letter
to a friend or to human resources manager). These findings call for a genre-based
approach to the lexicographical treatment of collocations and other word
combinations.

English language is a compulsory subject taught at all levels in every Malaysian school, which means

each learner will undergo at least eleven years of language learning at school level. With effect from

2005, English was used to teach all Science and Mathematics-related subjects in schools. However,

due to some discrepancies in its implementation, the curriculum was abolished in 2011 and the

national language (Malay language) is once again used as a medium of instruction in teaching these

subjects. At the tertiary level, although the medium of instruction at undergraduate level in most

public universities is the Malay language, most courses run in universities are conducted in English.

Furthermore, all private higher educational institutions in Malaysia use English language as a

medium of instruction.