Lexical Collocations in a Sample Corpus of Nursing Research Articles (SCNRA)

Abstract

This corpus-based study was conducted in an attempt to facilitate the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) as well as English for Specific Purposes (ESP) by exploring lexical collocations in a Sample Corpus of Nursing Research Articles (SCNRA). The SCNRA, with a corpus size of over 1.25 million running words, was compiled from 300 research articles from 10 nursing journals. Under the set criteria, 717 keywords were obtained using the AntConc version 3.4.4. The majority of the keywords were nouns (63.51%), followed by adjectives (21.54%), verbs (13.44%), and adverbs (1.51%) respectively.  The keywords then were used as “nodes” to find their “collocates” which generated 2,148 pairs of lexical collocations with 14 combination types, where six combination types were in accordance with the set framework adapted from Benson et al.’s (2010).  The majority of them were Noun + Noun (41.39%), Adjective + Noun (28.4%), and Noun + Verb (11.17%) respectively. The lists of the keywords and the collocations produced are provided.