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Description
English language today serves as a crucial medium for knowledge dissemination (Jenkins, 2014), facilitating more global linguistic interactions than any other language (Galloway & Rose, 2015). This extensive reach has significantly influenced lexicography through corpus linguistics, providing evidence of word use both as single units (Coxhead, 2000) but also in phraseological combinations where corpora have had the most transformative impact (Paquot, 2015). Additionally, EAP lexicography (Frankenberg-Garcia et al., 2019; Paquot, 2015; Wanner et al., 2013; Granger & Paquot, 2010) and discipline-specific EAP lexicography (Rees, 2018; 2021) have garnered significant attention in recent years. In the context of EAP pedagogical lexicography, this presentation aims to explore how different semantic categories of nouns succeeded by that and a complement clause, a construction crucial for conveying stance in academic writing (Biber et al., 1999), are variably used in three academic disciplines: Applied Linguistics, Education, and Psychology. In each of these three disciplines the study specifically targets two distinct subfields: in applied linguistics the focus will be on teaching and learning; in education, the focus will be on instructional science and learning; in psychology, the focus will be on educational and cognitive aspects. Opting to focus on two subfields within each discipline, as in previous studies (e.g., Hu & Cao, 2015), this research also reveals semantic differences embedded in discourse and rhetoric among subdisciplines within the same academic field. Analysing 535.214 words (Table 1) from research articles in three fields and six subfields in total, the research focuses on the frequency and semantic nuances of the Noun Complement construction in question. This study utilizes ALPE, a manually compiled corpus in Sketch Engine for this analysis. Adopting the methodology pioneered by Francis et al (1998) and refined by Charles (2007), this study delves into a detailed categorization of nouns, segmenting them into various semantic groups. This methodology facilitates a more nuanced analysis by semantically grouping nouns within their thematic or conceptual categories, uncovering deeper patterns and meanings, and offering insights into their contribution to the overall discourse in specific academic fields. Finally, the presentation concludes with recommendations for the lexicographical treatment of noun that constructions applicable for dictionary compilation, teaching materials development, online resources and writing assistant tools that will prove useful to lexicographers, EAP teachers, and by extension to students, native and non-native alike.
