Contribution Of Phraseological Units To Discourse Coherence In Academic Research Papers

As is known to all,even for a long period of time,linguists have discussed phraseological units(PUs),intertextuality and coherence from various perspectives,the relationship between intertextual PUs and discourse coherence is rarely explained explicitly in previous studies.Today,technologies based on natural language processing(NLP)enable us to get sophisticated access to stored information in texts,and bring a new,empirical perspective to researches of PU,intertextuality and coherence.This thesis attempts to integrate the three in the analysis of linguistic academic research papers.Using a self-compiled corpus,in combination with the recently developed NLP techniques with python,this study investigates how coherence is achieved by PUs,especially,intertextual PUs,in a corpus of discourse flows.The PU retrieving process in this study is semi-automatic,which involves two phases: identification of PUs of the corpus,and identification of intertextual PUs of the corpus.The term PU,just like many other linguistic terms,is ambiguous.The alternative terms are formulaic expression,fixed expression,frozen expression,fixed phrase,set expression,phrasal lexeme,phraseme,phraseolexeme,phraseologism,and etc.The definition of PUs taken in this study is proposed by Gries(2008)in his paper,Phraseology and Linguistic Theory.A discourse flow is “a series of interconnected discourses”(Martin Warren,2009),and the flows in this study were collected from a linguistic journal,Annual Review of Applied Linguistic,ranging from 1980 to 2019.There are two questions which will be addressed in this thesis:(1)What are the prevailing PUs in academic research papers? And how do they contribute to discourse coherence of academic research papers?(2)What are the high-frequent intertextual PUs in academic research papers?The author finds that the canonical PUs in academic research papers can be grouped into certain categories related to the building-up of coherence.Moreover,by locating these PUs,one can easily analyze either the global coherence or the local coherence of an academic research paper.