Identifying verb collocational patterns in a specialized medical journal corpus

Abstract

This paper examines the collocational patterns of frequent verbs in medical research articles, and proposes a way to help non-native speakers of English learn word combinations frequently used in specific professional genres. We explore the correlations in the syntactico-semantic behavior and the collocational patterns of related verbs, in order to systematically teach recurrent word combinations.To this end, we present a corpus-based analysis of the collocational patterning of the verbs which belong to the same semantic frame in FrameNet, the frame EVIDENCE. These verbs were identified in 397 medical research articles from a pre-release version of the PERC (Professional English Research Consortium) corpus (3,155,118 tokens and 115,960 word types). The verbs examined, in approximate order of degree of increasing certainty, are suggest, argue, show, reveal, prove, demonstrate, substantiate, verify, confirm and corroborate. The results reveal that verbs that can be grouped into semantic and syntactic coherent sets also share combinatorial properties. We conclude that, rather than studying isolated verbs, making learners aware of these patterns of verb groups can greatly contribute toward efficient learning of the language of professional texts.

Semantic frames and semantic networks in the Health Science Corpus

“…Whereas the relevance of frame semantics in lexicography is well known Atkins and Rundell, 2008;Fontenelle, 2012;L'Homme, 2008L'Homme, , 2010L'Homme, , 2014Kövecses and Csábi 2014), there have been few studies approaching the use this theoretical framework in teaching (Blanco 2006;Kövecses and Csábi 2014). However, there is great potentiality in using frame semantics once language teachers have acquired the necessary theoretical background knowledge to take advantage of the precision and systematicity of the syntactico-semantic information it can provide to prepare effective education materials (Verdaguer and Noguchi 2018). Frame semantics and its implementation in the project FrameNet, which systematize the relations between related lexical units and provide information on syntactic realization can be used by teachers in order to group the lexical items belonging to the same frame and thus give coherence and systematicity to their teaching.…”

“…Suggest, which is a verb placed at one extreme of the continuum of tentativeness, collocates with strongly or conclusively, which reinforce the degree of certainty (the data strongly suggest…), whereas these adverbs do not collocate with the verbs in which certainty is already implicit in their meaning. (Verdaguer and Noguchi 2018). FrameNet illustrates the most typical collocates of a lexical unit in the annotated sentences which are shown but does not explicitly mark them.…”