A phrase-frame list for social science research article introductions

A phraseological examination of research articles in the field of environment using key phrase frame

“…However, this finding is not supported by Cunningham's (2017) study in which majority of PFs identified in his corpus of mathematics RAs were verb-based. This disparity in findings of Cunningham's (2017) and other studies (Golparvar and Barabadi, 2020;Lu et al, 2018) including the present study can be attributed to the fact that "…even within the highly controlled genre of published research articles, mathematics seems different" (Cunningham, 2017: 71). The extensive use of nouns in PFs can be an indication that academic writing is more compressed structurally (Biber & Gray, 2010).…”

“…The list included n-grams of size four and five, and following the previous research (Grabowski, 2015;Fuster-Markuez & Pennock-Speck, 2015;Römer, 2010), we initially extracted n-grams of size four. Additionally, n-grams of size five were included for two reasons: first, longer n-grams make it possible to extract more semantically complete PFs (Lu et al, 2018); second, n-grams of size five allow us to identify those PFs concerning discipline, genre, and register-specific (Cunningham, 2017;Römer, 2009). With the size of n-grams decided, all the variants of each p-frame were obtained through the software.…”

“…17 in our corpus) were retained and the rest were removed. As for the range, previous researchers (Cunningham, 2017;Golparvar & Barabadi, 2020) held that a p-frame should appear at least in 75% of the texts constituting a corpus, but as Lu et al (2018) rightly argued determining range threshold is an arbitrary decision which is contingently made by the researchers. Given all these considerations, any p-frame had to appear in three texts out of five texts (e.g.…”

“…First, all PFs containing proper names, punctuation marks, digits, and other symbols were discarded. Following Lu et al (2018), we excluded all linguistically incomplete PFs (* surface area of the with fillers such as the, specific, and protected) or did not enjoy clausal boundaries (e.g. the adsorbent * the with fillers such as and, however, and from).…”

“…To add to the significance of PFs, Fletcher (2006Fletcher ( , 2011 holds that the inclusion of these frames in the academic lists enriches academic formulaic expression appreciation both in writing and conversations acquisitively and pedagogically. These variants in a frame usually establish similar semantic or functional clusters such as in 'the * of the study which can be filled by purpose and goal as well as motivation or rationale' (Lu et al 2018) and they are more variable in writing than in conversation (Gray & Biber, 2013). These explanations provide us with the insight that teaching variable frames helps teachers present abundant language to learners while reducing the cognitive reliance on memory and helps learners understand the degree of formulaicity of varied linguistic constructions.…”