University registers of an institutional kind −e.g. course syllabi and university brochures− are increasingly attracting scholarly attention. Research so far has focused on native texts, yet it has been suggested that "in order to understand the use of English in present-day academic communities, it is vital to look at English as a lingua franca" (Mauranen 2010). Indeed, universities in non-English speaking countries worldwide also use English to communicate with their stakeholders, trying to stand out in the global educational market. This chapter pursues two inter-related aims: first, it introduces acWaC-EU (an acronym for “academic Web-as-Corpus in Europe”), a 90-million word corpus of institutional academic texts in English, collected using semi-automatic procedures from the websites of European universities; second, it aims to provide a preliminary characterization of the native and lingua franca varieties represented in the corpus with respect to their phraseology. Drawing on Durrant and Schmidt (2009), and focusing on the genre of homepages, we extract contiguous pre-modifier + noun sequences from the native and the comparable lingua franca subcorpora; to ensure greater homogeneity in the latter group, we only take into account texts produced in EU countries with a Romance L1 background (e.g. Italy and France). Deriving frequency data from ukWaC, we classify word sequences according to three criteria: frequent vs. infrequent/unattested combinations, and “strong” vs. “weak” collocations based on two association measures, i.e. t-score and MI. Finally, we compare the degree to which the native/lingua franca varieties represented in the corpus rely on different types of word combinations. Results point to a significant overuse of infrequent combinations and underuse of strongly associated collocations in lingua franca texts. The chapter discusses these results and their relevance for research on institutional academic English and in general for native vs. non-native use of phraseology.
Adriano Ferraresi, Silvia Bernardini (2015). Institutional academic English and its phraseology: native and lingua franca perspectives. Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars.
Institutional academic English and its phraseology: native and lingua franca perspectives
FERRARESI, ADRIANO;BERNARDINI, SILVIA
2015
Abstract
University registers of an institutional kind −e.g. course syllabi and university brochures− are increasingly attracting scholarly attention. Research so far has focused on native texts, yet it has been suggested that "in order to understand the use of English in present-day academic communities, it is vital to look at English as a lingua franca" (Mauranen 2010). Indeed, universities in non-English speaking countries worldwide also use English to communicate with their stakeholders, trying to stand out in the global educational market. This chapter pursues two inter-related aims: first, it introduces acWaC-EU (an acronym for “academic Web-as-Corpus in Europe”), a 90-million word corpus of institutional academic texts in English, collected using semi-automatic procedures from the websites of European universities; second, it aims to provide a preliminary characterization of the native and lingua franca varieties represented in the corpus with respect to their phraseology. Drawing on Durrant and Schmidt (2009), and focusing on the genre of homepages, we extract contiguous pre-modifier + noun sequences from the native and the comparable lingua franca subcorpora; to ensure greater homogeneity in the latter group, we only take into account texts produced in EU countries with a Romance L1 background (e.g. Italy and France). Deriving frequency data from ukWaC, we classify word sequences according to three criteria: frequent vs. infrequent/unattested combinations, and “strong” vs. “weak” collocations based on two association measures, i.e. t-score and MI. Finally, we compare the degree to which the native/lingua franca varieties represented in the corpus rely on different types of word combinations. Results point to a significant overuse of infrequent combinations and underuse of strongly associated collocations in lingua franca texts. The chapter discusses these results and their relevance for research on institutional academic English and in general for native vs. non-native use of phraseology.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
