6. Formulaic language in English academic writing

Use of Google Scholar in corpus-driven EAP research

“…The following points summarise the advantages of large corpora, especially ones which are generally available: 1. A large corpus offers a valuable insight into the use of complex language structures, including fixed expressions, which are typically rare even in large corpora (Newman & Rice, 2001;Oakey, 2002;Sinclair, 1991Sinclair, , 2001Sinclair, , 2004. 2.…”

It was found that…: Introductory it Patterns by Native and Non-Native Authors

“…This plethora of research reminded the statement of Hyland (2008, p. 3) that "academic writing is persuasive" and "at the heart of the academic persuasion is, then, writers' attempts to anticipate possible negative reactions to their claims". Although many recent studies revealed that introductory it pattern might be difficult and problematic for both native (Larsson, 2017) and non-native speakers (Hewings & Hewings, 2002Hunston, 2002;Oakey, 2002) of English, most of them excluded introductory it patterns with passive matrix predicates (Zhang, 2015) and very little attention has been paid to investigating potential differences of introductory it patterns by native and non-native authors. Therefore, this study aims to compare the use of introductory it patterns in a corpus of research articles written by native speakers of English with the use of introductory it patterns in a corpus of research articles written by nonnative Turkish authors.…”

Lexical Connection: Semiterm Grammatical Patterns in Spanish

“…Terms used in the reference works to describe formulaic sequences López Ferrero, Carmen (2012). "Lexical Connection: Semiterm Grammatical Patterns in Spanish", Applied Linguistics, nº33(4), Oxford University Press, I choose the term grammatical patterns ('prefabricated routines and patterns') to highlight the following four basic features of the object of the present study: i) they constitute specific syntactic structures, for example, copulative structures such as 'it is NP that', relative clauses as 'what P is that', and impersonal constructions such as 'it is Ved that' (Oakey 2002;Hyland 2004); ii) the lexical items that fill them tend to belong to a particular semantic type; iii) they exhibit some degree of phraseologization and conventionalization (Hunston 2001) -in fact, a pattern is a repeated discourse insofar as it is a way of saying things that is preferred by a community of speakers in certain contexts; and iv) they perform a pragmatic function: they either act as discourse markers that indicate the text organization or are related to interactive functions (Simpson 2004). It is specifically this pragmatic function of patterns as discourse markers that accounts for their high frequency of use (cf.…”