A Study Of English Logistics Textbooks From The Perspective Of Phraseology

In modern times,logistical industry has been playing an increasingly significant role in global trade activities.Logistics textbooks,composed and edited by professional experts and experienced editors,are the combination of systematic logistics expertise and professional logistics expressions,contributing to assist learners to visualize the disciplinary knowledge system,and at the same time,master the language of logistics.However,few studies pay attention to the language of logistics textbooks.Therefore,based on the self-established corpus of logistics textbooks,this thesis explores the language of logistics textbooks with the perspective of phraseology,the guide of register theory and the aid of a wide range of corpus techniques.This overall research objective can be decomposed to five closely related research questions: 1)Which words are frequently used in logistics textbooks? 2)Which lexical bundles are frequently used in logistics textbooks? 3)Which keywords are employed in logistics textbooks? 4)What collocational features are displayed in logistics textbooks? 5)What might be the link between the corpus evidence and disciplinary knowledge in the language of logistics textbooks?In order to address the above research questions,a 0.35-million-word corpus from three authoritative logistics textbooks was compiled and such corpus techniques as wordlist analysis,n-gram analysis,keyness analysis,collocational analysis and concordance analysis were employed respectively.The results show that in the investigated logistics textbooks: 1)The content words,especially nouns,take a predominant position.Words such as SUPPLY,TRANSPORT,COST,ORDER and STORE,which can both be used as Adjective and Verb in GE situation,serving as Nouns over 90%.And high frequency words like SUPPLY,LOGISTICS,CHAIN,TIME,MANAGEMENT and CUSTOMER are highly related to the logistics disciplinary knowledge,illustrating the importance of these words and their contribution on the construction of logistics semantic web and knowledge system;2)The structure of 4-word lexical bundles incorporating noun phrase and prepositional phrase fragments takes the highest proportion and the research-oriented function of 4-word lexical bundles is mostly exerted.The research-oriented function for Topic,the top 1 realized sub-function,is mainly served by noun phrase and preposition phrase fragments as well;3)Nouns and semi-technical terms account for the majority of the keywords employed,which demonstrates the cross-disciplinary feature of logistics knowledge.And keywords can be further divided into 5 semantic groups,namely Logistics participants,Logistics entities,Logistics actions,Logistics activities and Logistics descriptions;4)The representative keywords in each semantic groups co-occur with each other,presenting the chaining feature of logistical procedures.And the representative keyword will combine with its collocates to serve as fixed expressions,working mainly for the categorization of relevant concepts;5)The link between the corpus evidence and disciplinary knowledge in language of the logistics textbooks lies in the realization of such three metafunctions as ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function,contributing to shape the content,expression and style of logistics textbooks.This study sheds new lights into the linguistic features of English logistics textbooks.The attested evidence from corpus will probably be able to enrich compilation of business English dictionary and English-Mediated Instruction of logistics.