No abstract

The analysis of phraseology in the specialized discourse of science has sparked researchers’ interest in the last few decades, probably because the use of word groupings in specific registers can provide information about certain typical features of the genre. For instance, Gledhill (2009) explores colligations of tenses in scientific articles and discovers that the present tense is used for qualitative and empirical expressions, while the past tense provides quantitative and research-oriented descriptions; Pérez-Llantada (2014) investigates 4-word lexical bundles in research articles, finding that these multiword combinations express referential meaning and organize the text; finally, Jiménez-Navarro (2019) analyzes adjective + noun collocations in a corpus of scientific papers and concludes that these phraseological units convey specific meanings when used in this genre, since they represent the contents of research articles. The aim of the current study is to contribute to the analysis of 4-grams in the language of science. To this end, two specific objectives are defined: first, to ascertain the structure of 4-grams; second, to analyze the function they perform. The methodology was based on a corpus and entailed five major steps: (1) a specialized corpus of research articles was built, (2) a list of 4-grams was automatically extracted using the software Sketch Engine, (3) the resulting list was manually verified in order to suppress inaccurate candidates, (4) the selected units were classified depending on their structural framework, and (5) the selected units were categorized according to their function in the text. The findings show that, in terms of the first objective, the most typical 4-grams were noun phrases; and as for the second objective, the sequences examined mostly concerned the research conducted and the authorship of the texts. All in all, the 4-grams identified were structures that were specific to the genre under study but could also be used in other domains.

This paper investigates the terminological value of motion verbs in the specialized discourse of adventure tourism, being the primary focus placed on fictive meaning. Thus, we will delve into the participants surrounding motion verbs in context, given that the former activate the latter’s specialized meaning and are key to discover the type of motion represented. With this objective in mind, we will adopt a corpus-driven methodology and a lexico-semantic approach, following these steps: (1) the compilation of a specialized English corpus, (2) the automatic extraction of a list of candidate verbs and their manual verification, and (3) their categorization according to the type of motion depicted, that is, real, fictive or both. The main findings show that, despite having found a greater representation of real motion in this discourse, verbs denoting fictive motion were worth examining, as 50% of the results inferred at least one example of this type.

Tourism discourse as a domain-specific discourse is characterized by a set of linguistic, pragmatic, and function features that make it different from other discourses and the general language. One of its essential elements is the usage of appealing, innovative, exotic-sounding words in order to attract potential tourists by "persuading, luring, wooing and seducing" [6]. In this context, formulaic language plays a key role. To date, research into chunks of language used in tourism have mostly focused on collocations [1,8,23], with a few works on longer sequences [11,12,13]. Bearing this in mind, this paper aims to contribute to the analysis of 4-word bundles in this domain, more specifically, in the segment of adventure tourism. To do so, a corpus-driven analysis was undertaken. As for our methodology, a specialized corpus containing English promotional texts was compiled. After that, the software Sketch Engine was used to extract a list of potential 4-word bundles. Next, manual verification was performed to ensure the validity of the units. Finally, the resulting list was classified according to their structural framework and their function in the text. The findings show that, in terms of the structure, the most typical sequences were verbal bundles; on the other hand, in terms of the function, a significant amount of the units was mainly used to address readers directly.