What do different word lists reveal about the lexical features of a specialised language?
Most corpus-based investigations capitalise on word list analyses: frequency, keyword, and key-keywords, in profiling the lexical features of a specialised language. Though the three word lists have been used in many corpus-based language studies, comparisons across these three types of word lists...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2018
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/12900/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/12900/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/12900/1/25056-85221-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | Most corpus-based investigations capitalise on word list analyses: frequency, keyword, and key-keywords, in
profiling the lexical features of a specialised language. Though the three word lists have been used in many
corpus-based language studies, comparisons across these three types of word lists in characterising a
specialised language has not been made to identify any salient information each word list can reveal about the
target language. This paper provides comparisons of Engineering English using three types of word list:
frequency, keyword and key-keyword lists. The purpose is to identify the lexical information that can be
revealed by the groups of words listed according to each type of word lists. To conduct the analyses, a corpus of
Engineering English (E2C) is created. All the word lists from the corpus are extracted using the Wordsmith
software. Next, further analyses on the distribution of the vocabulary components, namely function vs. content
words, and word categories i.e. GSL, AWL and Others, are conducted on all the three word lists. The findings
reveal that different word lists result in different ranges of words, and the analyses of the words reveal the
distinct features of the specialised language at different levels. Given such differences, this study provides
insights into which word lists are to be considered in a lexical study for language description purposes. Hence,
this study further verifies the importance of corpus-based lexical investigations in providing empirical evidences
for language description. |
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