| Nowadays,with the rapid development of the knowledge economy in the world,the number of international publications by Chinese scholars has increased significantly.As a crucial part of the paper,the abstract largely decides whether a paper is accepted by journals.When writing a readable abstract,verbs are of significance in making accurate and concise sentences.Different from traditional grammar,valency grammar not only emphasizes lexical items but also lay stress on syntax,so it can reflect the dependence on core terms and their dominant terms.From the perspective of valency theory,this study aims to explore the similarities and differences of valency patterns of high-frequency verbs of two self-built corpora.The research questions are as follows:(1)What are the valency patterns and features of high-frequency verbs in two corpora?(2)What are the typical valency patterns of high-frequency verbs in two corpora?(3)What are the similarities and differences between the valency patterns of verbs USE and FIND in two corpora?To answer the question above,Two corpora of SSCI(46390 words)and CSSCI(41970 words)were built.With the help of Ant Conc 3.5.9 software,the high-frequency verbs in SSCI(USE,FIND,EXAMINE)and in CSSCI(USE,FIND,SHOW)were retrieved.Then,the valency patterns are part-of-speech tagged by Tree Tagger software,to get the data needed for calculating collovalency strength,and the collovalency of each valency pattern is calculated by SPSS 27.0 to determine whether it is typical.Finally,based on the findings above,the similarities and differences in the valency pattern of the same high-frequency verbs in the two corpora were compared.The research results show that:(1)In both corpora,the patterns with the highest frequency of high-frequency verbs are bivalent.In SSCI,the high-frequency valency patterns of USE,FIND,and EXAMINE are: <Sub V Obj vb-to-inf.>,<Sub V Obj-that>,<Sub V Obj>.In CSSCI,the high-frequency valency patterns of USE,FIND,and SHOW are: <Sub V Obj vb-to-inf.>,<Sub be V-ed Obj-that>,<Sub V Obj-that>.(2)In the two corpora,which shows a significant correlation between the high-frequency verbs and their valency patterns(p<0.05).whereas a few of them are atypical(p>0.05).So,most valency patterns of the high-frequency verbs retrieved above from two corpora are typical.(3)As far as FIND is concerned,its high-frequency valency pattern in SSCI is bivalent <Sub V Obj-that>,but in CSSCI,<Sub be V-ed Obj-that>,which is not used in SSCI.In addition,research subjects,such as“children”,“learners” and “speakers”usually serve as a subject of sentences in SSCI,while,in CSSCI,researchers are subjects.When expressing certain findings and research results,a subjective first person was often used in SSCI,whereas in CSSCI more objective third person was used.This study extends the verb valency patterns to academic discourse,which help the contributors to quickly grasp the syntax of high-frequency verbs in the abstracts of linguistic academic papers,strengthening the standardization of academic English writing,and improving the possibility of contributions being accepted by target journals.On the other hand,it is useful for second language teachers and learners to improve their English writing ability with the help of the typical valency patterns of high-frequency verbs,which is of great value to the process of second language acquisition. |
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