We have all seen and read ‘words’ from a very early age, and words are therefore the norm, both in written text and, by extension, in speech, while phraseology is something which needs to be pointed out separately, and sometimes is. Another very simple, though extremely powerful reason is‘the printed word’. These include conservatism, and the very heterogenous, disorderly nature of phraseology. There are a number of reasons for the slow progress made by phraseology.
Phraseology, however, does not yet have the role it deserves within ELT methodology or syllabuses, despite the many professionals who have worked in this direction, from Palmer and Hornby, through to the ‘corpus age’ and the ‘lexical approach’, to the very recent work on pedagogically motivated ‘phrase lists’ (Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, AL 31/4 Martinez & Schmitt, AL 33/4). The findings obtained in the research may be of interest to researchers investigating varieties of computer-mediated language, language educators and other specialists in applied linguistics.Ĭorpus-based research suggests quite strongly that a significant proportion of native-speaker English comes in the form of phraseological units of one sort or another.
The author demonstrates that each type of CMAD has specific linguistic characteristics distinguishing it from other types. This indicates that the studied types of CMAD are rather similar on one dimension but different on another.
The results of Scheffé’s test show that there is a significant statistical difference between at least one pair of the mean values on each dimension. Considerable differences have been revealed in the use of fifty-five types of linguistic features in the sub-corpora. Multidimensional analysis of the variance of linguistic features (Biber, 1988) was applied as the main quantitative research method. Six specialised corpora were complied to represent each type of CMAD. The article presents the results of empirical research investigating the specific linguistic characteristics of the types of Computer-Mediated Academic Discourse (CMAD) – the English language use by language teaching professionals in academic computer-mediated seminars (webinars), synchronous conferences (chats), asynchronous discussion fora, e-mails, weblogs and hypertexts.
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