The Language Of Accounting Textbooks:A Corpus-Based Study

The urgent demand for accounting professionals from the modern economic society has promoted the development of accounting education.Accounting textbooks as the crucial materials in constructing disciplinary knowledge are the typical educational resources.Through investigating the language used in textbooks,not only can the linguistic features be revealed but also a profound understanding of accounting can be formed.However,little attention has been paid to a corpus-based study of the language used in accounting textbooks.In order to fill in the research gap to some extent,this study explores the language of accounting textbooks based on a self-built corpus and aims to establish the bridge among the corpus study,accounting discipline and textbook discourse.The overall research objective is decomposed into four closely-related research questions: 1)Which words are frequently used in accounting textbooks? 2)Which four-word lexical bundles are frequently used in accounting textbooks? 3)What are the disciplinary keywords in accounting textbooks? 4)What are the collocational features of these disciplinary keywords? 5)What might be the link between corpus findings and disciplinary knowledge?In order to address the above research questions,this study has selected three accounting textbooks to compile the corpus(CATB),trying to make an analysis from the perspective of wordlist,n-grams,keyness and collocation with the help of the corpus tool—Word Smith 5.0,interpreting corpus findings within register theory and accounting discipline.The wordlist analysis shows that the top 100 words occupy nearly half(49.49%)of the whole corpus,among which,the largest part are still the general,non-accounting related words such as those functional words like prepositions and articles,while 24 words(including notional verbs,adjectives and nouns)of the top 100 are accounting-related among which the top ranked are company,cost,cash,costs and accounting.The n-gram analysis has detected a number of discipline-specific four-word bundles among the top 50 and cost of goods sold appears most frequently.Among the 450 bundles which appear more than 20 times in the corpus,structurally the bundles that incorporates noun phrase and the prepositional phrases account for the highest proportion,reaching 81.78%,while the bundles that incorporate verb phrases and the dependent clause structure only account for 15.78% and 2.44%.Functionally speaking,90.22% of these bundles are research-oriented bundles which are related to the topic discussed by the textbook authors,and only a small proportion of 9.78% helps to build text organization,participant stance and engagement.The keyness analysis further indicates the linguistic features of accounting textbooks that nearly 72% of the top 100 keywords are technical or semi-technical words in accounting.They belong to the disciplinary keywords and can be semantically categorized into six groups,namely accounting participants,accounting elements,accounting descriptions,accounting activities,accounting measurements and accounting tools.In addition,the top 5 keywords with the highest keyness are COST,COMPANY,CASH,ACCOUNTING and STATEMENT.Collocational analysis demonstrates that the adjective collocates of disciplinary keywords are mostly used to describe various types of elements in accounting and these adjectives tend interact with others from different semantics to form a collocating network;post-modifier is also a major feature of adjective collocates.The verb collocates of disciplinary keywords are mostly related to the action of using tools,recording and reporting.For the noun collocates,in general they fall into two categories: one is related to funds or money and its relative transformed shapes;the other one is associated with various recording devices and tools.Moreover,metaphorical expression in collocation such as cost pools is also a distinctive feature.It can be concluded from the corpus findings that the “field” has defined the range of language used in accounting textbooks and determined the frequency,keyness and collocational features,which helps to perform the ideational function,namely,to disseminate accounting knowledge.At the same time,this study shows that lexical bundles are an important device to achieve the interpersonal and textual functions in textbook discourse.Methodologically,this study sheds new insights on the study of accounting textbooks and has provided a feasible analytical framework.Moreover,it also has some pedagogical implications for the design of accounting textbooks as well as the classroom teaching of accounting in English.