Establishing the phraseological profile of a text type: The construction of meaning in academic book reviews

Römer, Ute

doi:10.1075/etc.3.1.06rom

Article published In: English Text Construction
Vol. 3:1 (2010) ► pp.95–119

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Establishing the phraseological profile of a text type

The construction of meaning in academic book reviews

Ute Römer | University of Michigan

Published online: 8 April 2010

https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.3.1.06rom

Starting from the observation that meaning does not primarily reside in individual words but in the phrase, this paper focuses on the examination of recurring phrases in language. It introduces a new analytical model that leads corpus researchers to a profile of the central phraseological items in a selected text or text collection. In this paper, the model is applied to a 3.5-million word corpus of online academic book reviews that represents part of the specialized discourse of the global community of linguists. This demonstrates how the model facilitates the study of the occurrence and distribution of the central phraseological items in linguistic book reviews, and how it helps to determine the extent of the phraseological tendency of language.

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