Investigating Frequency and Type of Lexical Collocations in Applied Linguistics Journal Articles Written in English by Iranian and Norwegian Scholars

Abstract

In today’s academic world, the research interest in corpus linguistics has shifted towards word co-occurrence rather than single words. Accordingly, a great body of literature has been devoted to investigations of recurrent word combinations in academic prose using frequency and dispersion parameters. This has resulted in analysis of corpus in different fields of study to collect comprehensive lists of academic collocations. Moreover, many contrastive studies have been conducted to compare the collocations used by native and non-native speakers of English. However, to the author’s knowledge, few studies have been conducted to compare the most frequent collocations in two corpora of research articles written by non-native speakers of English published in international journals in the field of applied linguistics. To fill this gap in the literature, the current study investigated the most frequent collocations used by Iranian and Norwegian scholars in a corpus of 17 articles published in the Journal of Pragmatics through a frequency-based approach. Nine out of 17 articles were written by Iranian scholars including 67,673 words and eight out of 17 articles were written by Norwegian scholars comprising of 64,682 words. The data of this study were collected using Collocation Extract software. The results of the study were presented in three phases. In the first phase, 15 most frequent lexical collocations in both corpora were identified which were classified under three types of lexical collocations. Based on what was obtained, Adj+N collocation type had the most proportion in the corpora while Adv+Adj type had the least proportion. In the second phase, the lexical collocations of the Iranian corpus were presented including a total of 818 collocations classified under five types. According to the results, Adj+N was the most frequent type while N+V was the least frequent one. Similar to the Iranian corpus, lexical collocations of the Norwegian corpus were identified. They were classified under four types including a total of 462, among which Adj+N was the most frequent type while Adv+Adj was the least frequent one. In the third phase, frequencies of lexical collocations were compared in the two corpora. According to the obtained results, the two corpora did not have any had significant difference in the use of all types of collocation except for Adj+N type of lexical collocations.