VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI University of languages and international studies Faculty of post-graduate studies ĐÀO THỊ NGỌC NGUYÊN A corpus-based study on collocations of keywords in English business articles ABOUT THE EUROPEAN DEBT CRISIS (Nghiên cứu tập hợp cụm từ của các từ khóa trong các bài báo tiếng Anh kinh tế về cuộc khủng hoảng nợ châu Âu) M. COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15 Hanoi - 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com iv TABLE OF CONTENT Declaration. iii List of tables. vii List of figures .ix CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION.
Statement of the problem and rationale of the study. Aims of the study. Scope of the study .3 CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW. Sense and sense relations.
Transference of meaning .7 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Other types of meaning transference. Definitions of collocations. Properties of collocations.
Collocations are arbitrary. Collocations are language-specific. Collocations are recurrent in context. Classifications of collocations.
15 CHAPTER III: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY. Data collection instrument. Construction of corpus. Extracted business articles.
Data collection procedures. 21 CHAPTER IV: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. 23 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vi IV. Collocation analysis of content keywords.
DEBT and CRISIS. Pedagogical implications and suggestions .1 Improving collocation competence among language learners .2 Corpus-based activities for learner‘s collocation development in ESP class. Suggestions for further studies.68 APPENDIX LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: List of the selected articles Table 2: Top 100 high-frequency words from the constructed corpus Table 3: First 25 keywords from the corpus Table 4: CRISIS Concordance (Adjective collocations) Table 5: Adjectives collocating with CRISIS Table 6: DEBT Concordance (Adjective collocations) Table 7: Adjectives collocating with DEBT Table 8: CRISIS Concordance (Noun collocations) Table 9: DEBT Concordance (Noun collocations) Table 10: Nouns collocating with CRISIS Table 11: Nouns collocating with DEBT Table 12: CRISIS Concordance (Verb collocations) Table 13: DEBT Concordance (Verb collocations) Table 14: Verbs collocating with CRISIS Table 15: Verbs collocating with DEBT LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com viii Table 16: Other patterns of CRISIS in the corpus Table 17: Other patterns of DEBT in the corpus Table 18: ECONOMIC Concordance (Noun collocations) Table 19: Nouns collocating with ECONOMIC in the corpus Table 20: Composite nominal containing ECONOMIC (with modification within the head) Table 21: Composite nominal containing ECONOMIC (with coordination in the modifier) Table 22: MARKETS Concordance (markets as ‗the total amount of trade in a particular kind of goods‘) Table 23: MARKETS Concordance (markets as ‗people who buy and sell goods in competition with each other‘) Table 24: MARKETS Concordance (markets as ‗a particular country, area or section of population that might buy goods‘) LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Concordance Program‘s main screen Figure 2: String matching of CRISIS from the corpus Figure 3: String matching of DEBT from the corpus Figure 4: String matching of ECONOMIC from the corpus Figure 5: String matching of MARKETS from the corpus LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I.Statement of the problem and rationale of the study The importance of vocabulary in language learning has always and long been recognized, although there were times when vocabulary was treated as separated from grammar and skills. However, under the light of recent studies, vocabulary has even gained much more attention.
Essential and crucial as it has become, vocabulary has been highlighted as the basis of language and communication. Wilkins, an outstanding British linguist, once stated "without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed". Obviously, a rich knowledge of vocabulary not only makes one's ability of using the language recognized and appreciated but also makes him or her be more successful in communication. However, no matter how convinced learners of English in principles of the importance of vocabulary, the vocabulary acquisition actually poses enormous difficulties to them.
One of the most complicated problems arising when vocabulary is dealt with is how to combine and use words appropriately in accordance with culture or language conventions, which is often referred to as ―collocation competence‖ (Hill,1999). Collocations are usually defined as words that typically occur in association with other words; in reality, they run through the whole of the English language and they are as old as the language itself. No piece of natural spoken and written English is totally free of collocations. Because of their widespread use, the role that collocations play in the language is absolutely undeniable.
For learners of English in general, with collocation competence, they should have the ability to combine lexical (and grammatical) chunks in order to produce fluent, accurate, as well as semantically and stylistically appropriate utterances. For business English learners in LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 2 particular, a good knowledge of collocation patterns in English is also of great importance. The most important characteristics of the language of business English, as opposed to the language of general English, are a sense of purpose, intercultural dimension and a need for clear, straightforward and concise communication (Ellis & Johnson, 1994). In order to achieve these broad objectives of business English learners, teachers have to find out the best ways to teach business performance skills such as socializing, telephoning, meeting, presentation, and report writing.
In all these situations, collocation competence is significantly essential. With the rise of computing power as well as the acceptance of corpus linguistics since 1990s, collocations have received serious treatment. The dramatic rise in processing power of computers now makes it possible to quickly compose lists of frequency for lexical items in a large corpus. At the same time, there have been a large number of different software programs installed for keywords and collocations extract from corpus data.
Such software packages have made easier access to the investigation into typical lexical items and their collocations of any particular text genres. With the writer‘s personal interest in collocations as a researcher and observations of students‘ tough experience in dealing with collocations in business discourse as a tutor of business learners, this thesis provides a comprehensive research on collocations of keywords in a variety of business articles written about a currently hot topic for business learners, the European debt crisis. The thesis, therefore, is carried out in the hope that it may be of some help to business learners of English as well as those who find themselves interested in English semantics and collocation-related issues. Aims of the study The aim of this research is to conduct a close investigation into collocations of keywords from a corpus of a certain number of business articles written about the European debt crisis.
To be specific, it identifies words with high frequency of occurrence within the chosen corpus and LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 3 examines their collocations. The research, therefore, is carried out to answer the following research questions: What are the top high-frequency words in the corpus of written articles about the European debt crisis? What are significant patterns and features of collocations of such keywords? I.Scope of the study This study is about to discuss keywords and their collocations in 15 written articles about the European debt crisis. The designed corpus of over 20,000 words is taken from online business articles from websites of high reputation such as The Washington Post, Money CNN, ….Keywords chosen for analysis of significant patterns of collocation within the study are those which can distinguish the business genre of the selected articles. Structure of the thesis The study is organized as follows: Chapter I-Introduction- is firstly introduced, briefly stating the rationale, aims, scope and organization of the study.
Secondly, chapter II-Theoretical Background- deals with the theories setting the background for the study. Thirdly, chapter III- Research Methodology- is a presentation on the methodology of the research, referring to the research design, data collection procedures and data analysis procedures of the study. Next, on chapter IV-Results and Discussion-, a detailed discussion of collocations keywords in the selected corpus is carried out, through which some interesting aspects can be revealed. In chapter V-Conclusion- major findings of the study and pedagogical implications and suggestions are presented.
LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 4 CHAPTER II THEORETICAL BACKGROUND This chapter is going to deal with the theories setting the background for the research on collocations of keywords in business articles about the European debt crisis 2011 under the light of corpus linguistics. In the first place, an overview of corpus linguistics is presented, followed by the theories of sense and sense relation. Then, the literature about transference of meaning is overviewed. The chapter will be closed with a presentation on collocation in an effort to provide a partial answer to three questions "What is collocation?", "What are properties of collocation that surface repeatedly across the literature?", and "How is collocation classified by different researchers?" II.
Corpus linguistics Nowadays, a lot of investigation has been devoted to how computers can facilitate language learning. With the help of computer technology, the contextual factors that influence variability in language use can be discovered through examples taken from corpora. A corpus can be described as a large collection of authentic texts that have been gathered in electronic form according to a specific set of criteria (Bowker& Pearson, 2002). Corpus linguistics (hereafter CL) deals with the principles and practice of using such corpora in language study.
As a branch of linguistics, it differs from traditional linguistics as it is related to the study of authentic examples of language (Sinclair, 1997). The main focus on CL is to discover pattern of authentic language in order to verify a hypothesis about language, for example, to determine how the usage of a particular sound, word, or syntactic construction varies. This, in turn, allows learners and researchers to ascertain related linguistic patterns and structures for the goals of their research. Conducting a corpus analysis is the very fundamental technique used by CL.
Corpus analysis is a means of accessing a corpus of text to show how any given word or phrase in the text is LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 5 used in the immediate contexts in which it appears. By grouping the uses of a particular word or phrase on the computer screen or in printed form, the researcher shows the patterns in which the given word or phrase is typically used. A large collection of a word‘s patterns then can be created very quickly and effectively. Thus, CL has been widely employed in other areas of linguistics and lexicography, where corpora can be used to help dictionary markers to spot new words and identify contexts for new meanings (Meyer, 2002).
In addition to its crucial function in language study in general, the role of CL in language pedagogy has become increasingly prominent. McEnery and Wilson (1996) argue that foreign language teachers usually produce simplified examples, which will raise difficulties for students when these are confronted with real, more complex language that sometimes they are incapable of processing. CL can thus contribute to rendering learning a foreign language more effective since students will be faced with real language. Authentic materials can motivate learners in the language classroom whereas non-authentic materials may not because they do not reflect real applications of language and thus students will lose motivation in learning in a target language.
The essence of exposure to authentic materials even becomes more accurate in the case of ESP classes where all lessons are highly purpose-driven. CL, therefore, takes an essential part in ESP, bringing a great deal of benefit to the teaching and learning on ESP courses.