Recurrent word-combinations in English student essays

Abstract

The point of departure for this study is Stubbs and Barth's article from 2003 where they describe how recurrent phrases can be used as text-type discriminators. A subset of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus - a corpus of student writing - consisting of English Studies essays is compared with two text-types taken from BNC-Baby in order to test and validate Stubbs and Barth's claims about recurrent word-combinations. Then the most salient combinations occurring in the BAWE student essays are subjected to a functional analysis, based on Moon (1998), to better be able to say something about their main functions in this text-type. Finally, the functions of recurrent phrases of the BAWE essays will be compared to the functional characteristics of the academic prose part of BNC-Baby.