Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

Collocations in Science Writing

Christopher Gledhill (2000).

Language in Performance Series No. 22,

Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag

270pp.

ISBN 3-8233-4945-7.

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 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

Preface.

This book is based on my doctoral research (1992-1995). It was motivated by a

desire to reach out from the Language Studies Unit (Aston) and talk with the people
in the labs opposite. The book is dedicated to the hard work of the cancer
researchers at Aston and Birmingham Universities: Dominique Armspach-Young,
William Fraser, Sally Freeman, John Gardiner, Andy Genscher, Helen Mulligan,
William Irwin, Peter Lambert, Richard Lewis, Peter R. Lowe, David Poyner,
Michael Tisdale, Yaruko Wang and Richard Wheelhouse. They all enthusiastically
participated in the survey and were kind enough to allow me to use their
publications in my text corpus.
The research presented here was inspired by the work of numerous linguists at
Birmingham University, some of whom developed the very first computer-based
analyses of texts. At the time I completed the thesis, there were no introductory
books on corpus linguistics, large teams of lexicographers were needed to create a
20 million word corpus, and there were no major collections of specialist texts. The
situation has evolved considerably since then, although specialist corpora are still
rare. At 500 000 words (including 150 research articles), the corpus I use in this
book is still a reasonable size, at least for the moment. Phraseology is one of the
most exciting branches of linguistics to be involved in at the present time, especially
in the fields of discourse and genre analysis. I hope that this book will inspire further
work in this particular area.
I would like to extend my thanks to all family, friends and fellow linguists whose
help and ideas have helped me with my work, especially Denis Ager, Chris
Beedham, Meriel Bloor, Malcolm Coulthard, Beverly Derewianka, Tony Dudley-
Evans, Noel and Janet Gledhill, Gill Francis, Liu Haitao, Tim Johns, R. A. (Tony)
Lodge, Jacky Martin, Céline Montibeller, Rainer Schulze, Christina Schäffner, Peter
Roe, Jean-Pierre Vidalenc and David and Jane Willis. I would also like to thank
Mike Hoey, Frank Knowles, Patricia Thomas and John Sinclair as well as the two
anonymous readers who kindly read the manuscript and suggested ideas at various
stages. They are not responsible for any errors and omissions. Mike Scott at
Liverpool University deserves my particular thanks as he introduced me to text
analysis by Microconcord and Wordlist (his program Wordsmith has now replaced
these programs and is available from Oxford University Press). Above all, I would
like to thank Tom Bloor, my teacher and supervisor, for his ideas and suggestions on
the final book. His good-natured intellectual rigour has enhanced and encouraged
the work of the many linguists who have graduated from Aston over the years.

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

CONTENTS
Section Page
I. Introduction 1 Aims 1
2 Underlying assumptions 5
3 Definitions of Collocation 7
II. Language and 19
Science
1 The Terminology of Science 20
2 The Discourse of Science 27
3 The Research Article Genre 35
3.1 Titles 40
3.2 Abstracts 41
3.3 Introductions 44
3.4 Methods and Results Sections 45
3.5 Discussion Sections 46
4. The Discourse Community 47
4.1 The Discourse of Cancer Research 47
4.2 A Textography of the Pharmaceutical Sciences
Department 51
4.3 Details of the Survey 54
III. Collocations and the 1 Choice in the Grammar of Texts 64
Corpus
2 The Lexico-grammar 73
3 Corpus Linguistics 79
4 Corpus Analysis and Languages for Specific 81
Purposes
5 The Status of Corpus Evidence 83
6 The Corpus and the Discourse Community 90
6.1 The Language View of the Pharmaceutical Sciences 91
Corpus
6.2 The Design Criteria of the Corpus 91
6.3 Choice of Material in the Corpus 93
6.4 Corpus Typology 98
6.5 Text Analysis 99
IV. Collocations and the 1. Collocations of Salient Words in the 110
Research Article Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus

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2. The Phraseology of Salient Items 115

2.1 AFTER 116
2.2 AND 116
2.3 DID 119
2.4 FOR 121
2.5 HAVE 122
2.6 IN 124
2.7 IS 134
2.8 NOT 139
2.9 OF 142
2.10 THAT 149
2.11 THERE 155
2.12 WAS 157
2.13 WE 160
3. The Phraseology of Research Article Sections 163
3.1 Titles 163
3.2 Abstracts 165
3.3 Introductions 168
3.4 Methods sections 179
3.5 Results sections 187
3.6 Discussion sections 193
V. Phraseology and the 1. Collocations and the Theory of Phraseology 201
Discourse of Science
2. Phraseology and Scientific Style 203
3. The Lexico-grammar of the Scientific Research 207
Article
4. The Role of Grammatical Items in Collocation 216
5. New Research Directions 221
VI. Appendix A Frequency List 225
VII. Appendix B Texts Used in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus 227
VIII. Appendix C Salient Word Lists 239
1. Salient Words in Titles 239
2. Salient Words in Abstracts 241
3. Salient Words in Introductions 243
4. Salient Words in Methods sections 245
5. Salient Words in Results sections 247
6. Salient Words in Discussion sections 249
IX. References 251

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

I. Introduction

1. Aims

The aim of this book is to explore the language of science writing. The
method is to describe scientific research articles on the basis of a computer-
held text archive (a corpus). While many features of language have been
identified in scientific texts, I examine one phenomenon in particular:
collocation. Collocation is a process by which words combine into larger
chunks of expression. Some collocations involve words which seldom occur
in other combinations (for example: ‘auburn hair’, ‘rancid butter’, ‘ups and
downs’). Others are turns of phrase made up of words that commonly occur
in many combinations (‘of course’, ‘so be it’, ‘as a matter of fact’). These
expressions are all related in phraseology, roughly defined here as ‘the
preferred way of saying things in a particular discourse’ (a formula adapted
from Kennedy 1984). My use of the term differs from lexicologists such as
Dobrovol’skij (1992) and Howarth (1998). The notion comes instead from
recent research in discourse analysis (Moon 1998a and 1998b) and happens
to correspond to the everyday use of the term in English to denote skilful
mastery of linguistic formulations (e.g. ‘in the phraseology of diplomatic
circles’). Whatever words we use to talk about these expressions, it is clear
they are a key part of the writing process, and it is impossible for a writer to
be fluent without a thorough knowledge of the phraseology of the particular
field he or she is writing in.
The more specific aim of this book is to demonstrate the role of
collocations in scientific English. Although much research has been carried
out to establish the range of these expressions in English and in other
languages, there remains a great deal to be said about the phraseology of
science, in particular the differences between the typical collocations of the
language as a whole and the kinds of expressions that are used in very
specialist writing. Intuitively, most English speakers are able to guess that
expressions such as ‘ups and downs’ and ‘so be it’ are rare in science writing.
Some expressions or words are seen as more central or stylistically typical in
the language than others, a concept critical to vocabulary studies and known
as centrality (Carter 1998). What distinguishes scientific English from other
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varieties of the language is that it is devoid of such idiomatic expressions.

This appears to be a property it shares with informational and administrative
prose. These texts are said to be restricted to a limited ‘neutral’ style. Some
linguists identify parts of the grammatical system such as the passive as more
typical of science writing, and from this claim that science writing is a
restricted form of the general language (or ‘sublanguage’). Others
concentrate on terminology and point to the processes of naming terms in
different specialisms: for them, terminology is central to scientific activity
and style is not an issue of importance. Both of these approaches imply that
science writing uses a selection of pared-down, neutral features of the
language.
In this book I intend to demonstrate that science writing is not style-less
and neutral, and that while scientific texts may be devoid of traditional
idioms, they employ a system of expression which is as ‘idiomatic’ (i.e.
distinctively fluent) as any other discourse. Most speakers are familiar with
the stereotypical features of specialised science writing. For example, verbs
are expressed in the passive (the thermostat beaker was filled with the buffer
solution, CoA-transferase brains were homogenized in 10-mM-Tris) and the
text is strewn with arcane symbols and terminology (ranging from the rather
poetic technical verb elute, eluted, eluting, elution to compound nominals
such as adipose tissue lipoprotein lipase and 2,2’,5’-Trihydroxy-4,5-
methylenedioxybiphenyl...). While these are of course typical and obvious
features of specialised scientific language, I explore the extent to which
science writing has evolved its own distinct phraseology. The following
sample (from a paper published in Tetrahedron Letters) demonstrates the
problems involved in how we describe science writing:

Although there are several procedures for the preparation of chiral pyrrolidines
and pyrrolidinomes, the majority of these exhibit poor enantiomeric excesses,
lack versatility, suffer low yields or some combination thereof. Herein, we
describe an efficient asymmetric system of substituted pyrrolidines and
pyrrolidinomes that should find general applicability to a variety of modern
synthetic challenges. (J. Gardiner, 1992 ‘Total synthesis of
Didehydrodideoxythymidine d4T’).

This text has some predictable features of scientific prose and at the same
time has a very distinctive style that one would not necessarily associate with
science writing, or even with natural, well-formed English. The cohesive
devices thereof and herein strike the reader as archaic or legalistic rather than
technical, while some perfectly recognisable English words have taken on a
specialized meaning in novel combinations (exhibit excesses, lack versatility,
suffer low yields, find general applicability). It is clear that even this short
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extract is made up of a mix of different styles (technical, archaic, legal,

expository) and makes use at the same time of a unique adaptation of the
normal collocations of English. The differences in style run much deeper
therefore than the usual emphasis on technical terms and verb forms might
suggest. The English of science not only undergoes a shift in vocabulary and
grammar but also in its discourse features and phraseology.
One particular aim of this book is to demonstrate that there are consistent
differences between the collocations of General English and Scientific
English, a feature that is sometimes forgotten when science writing is simply
seen as a limited grammar or a text dominated by technical terms. Another
specific goal is to establish the phraseology of different parts of the scientific
text (the Title, the Abstract and so on), and also to establish how far they are
stable across a series of different texts with different authors. While technical
authors are often assumed to write in a standard formal style that extends
across a variety of types of English, the analysis of collocations may reveal
much deeper tendencies that are particular to the research article genre.
Collocations are symptomatic of strong conventions in specialist writing,
although the means by which they become established are difficult to explain.
For example, it is highly unlikely that the author of the sample above had to
explicitly learn that the expression suffer few yields is an acceptable
combination in his field. Nevertheless, such phraseological knowledge must
be acquired at some stage for the expression to be used across the corpus, in a
variety of specialist texts on chemistry. In the survey I carry out in this book,
it emerges that scientists are rarely aware of how consistent their phraseology
is, although they are concerned with other features of their language.
While collocational patterns are not often consciously identified by
individual writers, they are relatively easy to demonstrate on the basis of a
computer-held corpus. However, one of the more difficult issues raised in
this book is the function of collocational expressions in the scientific text as a
whole and in the scientific community at large. Linguists such as Stubbs
(1996) have noted that a choice of expression often reveals a rhetorical or
ideological stance, and this is an important issue in the analysis of scientific
texts. For example in journalism people with cancer can be referred to either
as a patient, a sufferer or a victim. In more technical writing, the scientist
distinguishes between patients, controls and subjects. And more
fundamentally, if there is a consistent phraseology of science writing, one
might wonder what purpose it serves in the practice of science, and what
relation exists between the language of science and the underlying ideology
of science writing. The perspective I wish to explore in this book not only
identifies the typical way of saying things but also places these expressions in
relation to each other in terms of values. I shall argue that while collocations

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are useful units of expression, their relative value depends on their position
within the overall phraseological system. The use of the passive voice and
technical terms implies certain belief systems that are perpetuated in science
writing, and I hope to be able to put these systems in context from a
phraseological perspective.
Throughout this book, I wish to pursue three basic research aims. The first
is a practical one: to provide a method of describing language in a reliable
and objective manner. This is mainly achieved by the use of a computer-held
archive of texts (the corpus) collected specifically for the purpose of
linguistic analysis, and also by the use of software which calculates word
frequencies (the wordlist program) and collects word patterns (a
concordancer). However, I also try to demonstrate that the specialist corpus
requires a contextual basis, in particular one that takes account of the
processes of production of the corpus (as the property of a community of
scientists, as well as a text in relation to other scientific texts). Thus while the
methodology of this book follows the corpus linguistic approach of Sinclair
(1991), its theoretical basis also draws on theories of discourse and genre -
especially those of Halliday (1985) and Swales (1990). The practical
applications of such a method include the well-documented ability to use the
corpus as a tool for language teaching, as well as the possibility of using a
corpus as an editing tool and as a source of specialist information. One
simple application was suggested by one of my specialist informants: he
wanted to know what information to include in Abstracts and how to express
himself when writing them, because he felt that he needed to follow accepted
practice. Although the field I have chosen is very highly specialised, I also
wish to demonstrate that the methodology is sound and applicable to other
specialist genres.
The second aim of this book is a theoretical one: to establish a notion of
collocation within a theory of language, in particular to discuss the role of
collocations within texts. While collocations have become a central issue in
the study of vocabulary and lexicology (Carter 1998), their role in discourse
and genre analysis has not yet been fully explored. Although many studies
conceive of collocations as lexical units which are self contained, with a
grammatical structure dependent on one lexical item – i.e. less restricted
forms of idioms, a number of studies have emerged recently in which the
collocational properties of words are seen as parts of a wider system (for
example, Francis 1993, Hunston and Francis 1998). It is possible to list the
collocational properties of words in corpus analysis, but it is also necessary to
explain how these expressions are related to each other in a particular
language or discourse. I intend to demonstrate that while science writing may
be very heavily constrained in certain respects, it also allows for considerable

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choice of expression. This system of choice appears to be an important aspect

of the discourse of science, and a discussion of choice is seen as relevant to
the theory of language in general (McCarthy 1984, Halliday 1991).
The third aim of this book is more methodological. I hope to refine certain
practices in corpus linguistics, notably by designing a corpus on the basis of a
specific discourse community (the Pharmaceutical Sciences Department at
Aston University) but also by reviewing the methods by which collocations
are identified in texts. The latter is particularly necessary, because at present
– and despite the widespread use of the term in many works based on corpus
analysis – there is no clear notational convention for symbolising instances of
collocation. In order to simplify matters, I use a triangular bracket convention
< > for statistical collocations (the node and its collocates identified by word
list programs) and a curly bracket convention { } for lexical clusters (families
of words or phrases usually present in the context of a word and often with
similar meanings). In concordances, node words are signalled in bold, while
collocates are underlined. More fundamentally, although most collocational
analysis is usually based on the patterns of lexical words (content words), I
consider grammatical items to be central to the phraseology of my corpus.
Grammatical items enter into collocational relations with longer phrases (a
process similar to ‘colligation’, discussed below) and also form collocational
patterns amongst themselves (as shown by Renouf and Sinclair 1991). While
the fundamental phraseology of the corpus is revealed by statistical analysis,
my analysis depends on a further layer of interpretation. I argue that it is
necessary to relate superficial collocational patterns to the general
phraseology of the text, most notably by invoking a system of alternative
expressions and grammatical metaphor (Halliday 1998). I aim to show that
this contributes to a more sophisticated means of conducting corpus analysis,
in which the textual properties of collocational patterns are more carefully
related.

2. Underlying Assumptions

This book belongs to the British tradition of applied linguistics. Theoretical

linguists are preoccupied with symmetry and structure in language. They
describe systems of sound, networks of meaning or models of syntax. In
contrast, applied linguists attempt to relate theories of language to other fields
with the aim of bringing fresh insights back into the discipline. Applied
linguistics is not about avoiding theory however; it is about testing theoretical
models and engaging with the practical and political problems surrounding
language and discourse in areas such as industry, commerce and education.

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Applied linguistics involves research in first and second language learning

and acquisition, translation, dictionary-building, the study of terminology and
specialist languages as well as the critical description of political,
administrative and scientific discourse. Work in applied linguistics also tends
to address contemporary language. Applied linguists tend to allow linguistic
models to emerge through the discussion of data rather than to present the
model as the main object of enquiry. This preoccupation with data is often
interpreted as ‘stamp collecting’, but I hope to show here that a useful model
of language can emerge dialectically, through the gradual process of
demonstration and discussion of examples.
The work presented here has been particularly influenced by the research
of applied linguists based at British universities (sometimes known as the
Birmingham school, but also as the neo-Firthian school because of the
influence of J. R. Firth). This includes the work of J. Sinclair on the
computational analysis of language, but also that of G. Francis, S. Hunston,
T. Johns, R. Moon and D. Willis on lexical patterns, and T. Bloor, M.
Coulthard and T. Dudley–Evans on specific varieties of English. The term
‘neo-Firthian’ implies a wider group than this (M. Halliday, J. Swales, G.
Myers, M. Hoey, M.Stubbs, P. Meara, M. McCarthy, and others). While their
work is very often diverse, a number of common concerns have emerged:

• An interest in discourse (language in action, language in relation to its users).

• An emphasis on the close relationship between vocabulary and grammar.
• A preoccupation with authentic non-invented data.
• A preference for computers in the analysis of large archives of language.

In section II these themes are investigated in a review of traditional and

applied theories of the language of science. Section III then explores
Halliday’s notion of lexico-grammar and sets out the design criteria of the
text corpus. Section IV then provides a statistical and linguistic analysis of
the corpus. This leads me to discuss in section V the implications of a
phraseological approach to genre and discourse analysis in general.
Rather than build a general corpus of scientific texts I have opted to focus
on the language of cancer research. Over the period of my doctoral research
(1992-1995), I conducted a survey of pharmacologists and cancer researchers
at Aston University, in Birmingham (UK). There are five main reasons for
selecting cancer research as a corpus topic and the group at Aston in
particular:

• Cancer research is possibly one of world’s biggest medical research

activities, served by a large selection of the most prestigious scientific
journals.
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• Cancer is one of the most emotively reported and well-documented diseases

in the popular press. The discourse of cancer research is key to
understanding the relationship between the reporting of a scientific
breakthrough in the technical literature and its wider reporting in journalism.
The fact that cancer is an important topic in public discourse should be
justification itself for our attention.
• The field offers an interesting insight into the relationship between language
and science. Cancer research articles are written in a very highly refined
English. The writing is integrated into a high degree of abstract
pharmaceutical knowledge with a complex graphic system of
communication.
• Cancer is not a narrow specialism or a single research application but
instead involves a broad sweep of activities ranging from theoretical
chemistry to organisation management (biology, chemistry, drug synthesis,
genetics, patient care).
• The cancer research department at Aston is an important research centre for
the U.K. serving the National Cancer Institute (the British version, also
based in the region) and it has an above-average output of research with a
number of high profile breakthroughs reported in the media over the 1990s.
As such it offers an ideal context for a discussion of cancer research writing.

Even within this very specific field, the complexity and degree of
specialisation involved in cancer studies means that the corpus would be
meaningless without an account of its context. The corpus in turn must
represent a reasonably homogeneous linguistic community. The specific
linguistic practices of a professional group are at the heart of the genre
analysis approach (Swales 1990), although they have received little attention
in mainstream corpus linguistics. On the other hand, genre analysis has only
recently begun to use computer-based corpora. My hypothesis is that any
distinctive ‘style’ or phraseology I discover can be attributed to a broad
community of scientists in pharmacology and cancer research and contribute
to a description of the research article genre. Section II in particular explores
these themes and discusses in detail the context of the corpus.

3. Definitions of Collocation

A collocation is a familiar recurrent expression. For many linguists,

collocations are related to a range of commonly recognised multi-word
phrases in language, including catchphrases, clichés, fixed expressions,
formulae, free and bound collocations, idioms, lexical phrases, turns-of-
phrase and so on. Collocation has been defined in various ways, and
definitions depend on the specific aims of the observer. Phraseologists and
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dictionary makers, for example, examine the way lexical words behave in
certain combinations. The adjectives strong and powerful can thus be seen to
have a similar meaning but a different range of use with certain nouns: strong
argument, powerful argument versus strong tea / *powerful tea, *strong car /
powerful car. Once such a restriction is identified for a pair of words, we are
dealing with some form of collocation.
However, as the word ‘familiar’ suggests in my working definition, there
is more to collocation than the combination of two or more words. In the
following discussion, I attempt to synthesise three different ways of
categorising and defining the notion of collocation: Halliday’s statistical /
textual view, the semantic / syntactic tradition in lexicology, and the
discoursal / rhetorical model from discourse analysis. I then go on to propose
an overall model of phraseology which serves as a basis for the analysis
carried out in the rest of the book. In the corpus analysis sections of this
book, Halliday’s statistical definition is specifically taken as the first and
simplest stage of my analysis, but is then supplemented by further stages of
interpretation in order to determine the structural and rhetorical significance
of the collocations identified in the corpus.

From a statistical / textual perspective, it is generally agreed that no one

linguistic definition of collocation is entirely reliable when it comes to
finding expressions systematically in large numbers of texts. For this
practical reason, collocations have often been defined statistically in corpus-
based studies, especially if the analyst is attempting to find examples of
typical style. The first stage of analysis to be used in this book therefore
follows Halliday, who frames collocation in terms of statistical probability
and co-occurrence:

Collocation is the syntagmatic association of lexical items, quantifiable,

textually, as the probability that there will occur at n removes (a distance of
n lexical items) from an item x, the items a, b, c .... Any given item thus
enters into a range of collocation, the items with which it is collocated being
ranged from more to less probable. (Halliday 1961:276).

Van Roey summarises this view in terms of expression or ‘usage’:

[collocation is] that linguistic phenomenon whereby a given vocabulary

item prefers the company of another item rather than its ‘synonyms’ because
of constraints which are not on the level of syntax or conceptual meaning
but on that of usage. (van Roey 1990:46).

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A collocate can thus simply be seen as any word which co-occurs within an
arbitrarily determined distance or span of a central word or node. Collocation
is thus considered to be the frequency with which collocates co-occur with
one node relative to their frequency of collocation with other nodes. From the
point of view of many corpus linguists, all that separates collocation from
mere word co-occurrence is the statistical level at which the researcher is
happy to say that the co-occurrence is not accidental. This approach is also
‘textual’ in that it relies solely on the ability of the computer program to
analyse large amounts of computer-readable texts. Sinclair (1991:68) shows
this by noting that the independent probability of ‘set’ collocating with ‘off’
in the Cobuild corpus is just one in a million (1 855 instances of ‘set’
multiplied by 556 instances of ‘off’ from a total of 7.3 million words). Yet the
actual frequency of collocation is around 550 instances (that is: 70 in a
million). The expression ‘set off’ can thus be considered a significant
collocation without considering other semantic or lexical considerations
(1987b:153).
This perspective essentially emphasises collocation as co-occurrence
(words which frequently combine) and recurrence (combinations which
frequently occur in language). The notion of statistical collocation is integral
to Halliday’s theory of discourse and the theory is discussed in section III. It
is sufficient to note here that a statistical view of language allows the linguist
to identify patterns that would not normally be recognised using traditional
categories. The textual view of collocation also emphasises the fact that
collocations are not disembodied lexical units inserted into the body of a text
without modification, but are the result of reformulations and paraphrases
which have developed throughout the length of a text. A textual collocation is
likely to have a specific textual function or may occur in a rather restricted
set of contexts. These expressions can be seen to be couched seamlessly in
the surrounding text, and in many of the examples we see below, the
collocational patterns of a specific phrase are motivated or triggered by other
phrases which appear to be at some distance (a phenomenon observed by
Phillips 1985 and Hoey 1991). This is what is meant by ‘long-range
collocation’.

In contrast, the semantic / syntactic tradition defines collocation as a more

abstract relationship between words, without reference to frequency of
occurrence or probability, shifting the emphasis therefore from the textual co-
occurrence of an expression to its potential for lexical combinability. While
Halliday’s approach to collocation is appropriate to a discussion of discourse
and register, style is not the main concern in lexicology. Instead the emphasis
is on dictionary making and terminology, and collocations are typically seen

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either as units of meaning (lexical items or idioms) or units of grammar

(phrases). It is for this reason that collocation is usually seen as a rather
restricted category of expression and is also typically limited to the lexical
relation between content words. The standard definition is given by Benson:

Collocations … are fixed recurrent combinations of words in which each

word basically retains its meaning. (Benson 1989:85).

Howarth (1996) has presented a synthesis of the mainstream ideas of

lexicology and phraseology studies, taking particular account of the Russian
perspective (Dobrovol’skij 1992). He notes that the ‘composite unit’ is
traditionally classified according to two measures (1996: 36-46):

‘Commutability’ - The extent to which the elements in the expression can be

replaced or moved. As in the free collocation make a decision where make
can be replaced by a series of de-lexical verbs reach, take etc., while in the
restricted collocation shrug one’s shoulders there is no alternative to the
verb shrug.

‘Motivation’ - The extent to which the semantic origin of the expression is

identifiable, as in the figurative idiom move the goalposts [to change the
required conditions for success], as opposed to the opaque idiom shoot the
breeze [to chatter].

Fixed expressions are characterised by the relationship between their

component words and the overall meaning of the phrase. Cruse (1986) thus
distinguishes collocation as ‘syntagmatically simple’ i.e. an expression
composed of one word in its normal sense with another restricted word (as in:
table a resolution, tender one’s resignation) and idiom as ‘semantically
simple’ i.e. as a single choice of meaning with an unpredictable or non-
compositional sequence of words (let the cat out of the bag, spill the beans).
In Howarth’s lexical continuum model (1996:32-33), collocations are placed
on a sliding scale of meaning and form from relatively unrestricted
(collocations) to highly fixed (idioms):

Free collocation blow a trumpet ‘to play the trumpet’

Restricted collocation blow a fuse ‘to destroy a fuse’, or (idiomatic)
‘get angry’
Figurative idiom blow your own ‘to boast, sell oneself
trumpet excessively’
Pure idiom blow the gaff ‘to reveal a concealed truth’

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The problem commonly encountered with these classifications (as can be

seen in the ambiguous example of to blow a fuse) is that is difficult to
determine what is meant by ‘syntactically fixed’, ‘unmotivated’ or ‘opaque’.
In addition to the notion of the collocational continuum, one of the most
influential ideas to emerge from the field of lexicography involves
Mel’uk’sč theory of lexical functions. Mel’čuk defines collocation as an
semantic function operating between two or more words in which one of the
words keeps its ‘normal’ meaning (Mel’čuk 1995:182). Fontenelle explains
this abstract relationship:

[…] the concept of collocation is independent of grammatical categories: the

relationship which holds between the verb argue and the adverb strongly is
the same as that holding between the noun argument and the adjective
strong. (Fontenelle 1994:43).

For example, several restricted collocations in English have the abstract

function of ‘intensifier’ (coded by Mel’čuk as ‘magn’): stark naked, utter
foolishness, piping hot. The vocabulary as a whole is therefore organised into
a grammar of intensity, of quantity (a speck of dust, a pride of lions), of
operation (to lend support, to deal a blow), of function (war is raging,
silence reigns) and so on (Mel’čuk 1998:36-41). By bringing disparate
collocational patterns into a broad theory of meaning, Mel’čuk has argued for
a universal typology of lexical functions which are realised by a delimited
number of underlying lexical functions in English and other languages.
In lexicology and phraseology studies, idioms are seen as the prime
examples of semantic and syntagmatic units, and have a correspondingly
privileged status (Howarth 1998:169). On the other hand, collocations
emerge as less tidy and easy to categorise, being seen as increasingly less
fixed and also more diffuse – largely of course because they are often defined
in terms that make idioms generally appear to be ideal units. Collocations
also tend to be defined as a subcategory of other items. Mel’čuk, for example,
sees them as a very specific category: ‘Collocations – no matter how one
understands them – are a subclass of what are known as set phrases’
(Mel’čuk 1998:23). Approaching the issue from a different perspective, van
der Wouden (1997) has argued that collocation should be seen as the central
term in lexicology. He points out that regardless of the way collocations are
defined, analysts find more instances of collocation than of idiom in actual
texts, and proposes that the notion of ‘collocability’ requires better definition
than the more peripheral idea of ‘idiomaticity’. Like many linguists in the
generative field (for example, Abeillé 1995), he sees syntagmatic variability
as key to the notion of a fixed expression, and suggests that many features of
language are idiomatic in this sense:
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 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

I will use the term COLLOCATION as the most general term to refer to all
types of fixed combinations of lexical items. In this view idioms are a
special subclass of collocations, to wit those collocations with a non-
compositional, or opaque semantics. An idiom might even be defined as any
grammatical form whose meaning is not deducible from its structure. In this
view all morphemes are idioms. (van der Wouden 1997:9).

Makkai (1992) has similarly argued that collocations and idioms can be seen
as extended forms of words. Kjellmer makes a similar point:

Highly distinctive collocations behave in important respects like one-word

lexemes. They are often semantically identical or almost identical with
single words. (Kjellmer 1984)

Van der Wouden further makes the point that idioms and collocations share a
number of properties, not least of which the ability to contain analogies
which are not carried on into the rest of the language system:

[...] you cannot predict that the meaning of sleep like a log will denote an
intense form of sleeping, but after you have learned what it means, you see
that like a log is an intensifier. The essence of collocation is that the
assignment of like a log to the meaning ‘very’ does not feed other
combinations. So even though we have a meaning for it, that meaning is
only valid in a certain collocation [...] (van der Wouden 1997:54-55).

From this discussion, it emerges that the distinction between idiom and
collocation is difficult to justify on purely semantic or syntagmatic grounds.
Instead, collocation constitutes a general system of abstract relations which
underpin much phraseology in the language, and range from relatively free to
relatively fixed expression. A different perspective, although still within our
‘semantic / syntactic’ framework, relates collocational patterns to the wider
grammatical system, as in the work of Sinclair (1991). For example, Renouf
and Sinclair (1991) have noted that the meaning of a lexical item can be
predicted by the presence of grammatical items and the sequence in which
they are arranged. Thus in expressions such as an X of, X is often a quantity,
or in too Y in the Z, Y and Z are often time expressions (such sequences are
termed collocational frameworks). Louw (1993) has noted that clusters of
lexical collocations often share a similar semantic profile or ‘semantic
prosody’. Thus the NP subjects of the phrasal verb set in belong invariably to
a semantic field with negative associations (the bad weather, gangrene, the
rot, depression ... sets in). According to this perspective, the grammatical
patterns of co-occurrence are an intrinsic meaning of an expression, and any
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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

item which is inserted into the pattern can be re-interpreted in terms of the
existing collocational framework (e.g. a cacophony of musicians [collective],
the Labour party have set in [negative connotation]).
In a large-scale study of verb complementation, Hunston and Francis
(1998) similarly make a specific link between the grammatical form of an
expression (its underlying word class pattern) and its meaning, claiming that
the pattern is part of the meaning of the expression. Hunston and Francis
identify a number of collocations which share specific grammatical patterns
and yet also display a closely related meaning. Here is one example:

...sense and pattern tend to be associated with each other, such that a
particular sense of a verb may be identified by its pattern. The verb recover
has two main senses: ‘to get better’ following an illness or period of
unhappiness, and ‘to get back’ something that was lost. The first of these
senses has the pattern ‘V from n’ (e.g. He is recovering from a knee injury)
[...] and ‘V’ (e.g. It took her three days to recover), whilst the second has
the pattern ‘V n’ (e.g. Police... recovered stolen goods). (Hunston and
Francis 1998:51).

This can be seen to be an extension of the general principle of

delexicalisation, in which lexical items merge into grammatical forms,
effectively becoming grammatical collocations (grammatical words
collocating with lexical words). The expressions created by grammatical
collocation and colligation depend in turn on a notion of extended meaning,
as argued by Renouf (1998). The extended meaning of a word or expression
is built up over time by its collocational tendencies within different texts.
Thus while lexicologists conceive of collocation as a lexical unit and
examine the behaviour of component words within this larger lexical item,
Firthian and Hallidayan linguists see collocation as a specific grammatical
pattern, associated with a particular meaning. The work of Louw, Renouf,
Hunston, Francis and others has been much influenced by Sinclair’s notion of
the ‘idiom principle’. Sinclair (1991) argued that meaning is organised
through language not by filling lexical items into grammatical context-free
slots, but in a system where structure maps onto meaning very closely. He
emphasises the importance of syntagmatic sequences as single functional
choices, and argues that neither individual words nor deep syntactic
structures correspond to natural choice in language:

The principle of idiom is that a language user has available to him or her a
large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices,
even though they might appear to be analysable into segments. To some
extent, this may reflect the recurrence of similar situations in human affairs;
it may illustrate a natural tendency to economy of effort or it may be
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motivated in part by the exigencies of real-time conversation. (Sinclair

1987c: 320)

From the ‘semantic / syntactic’ perspective, we have seen that the notion of
collocation has been extended from traditional restricted collocations and
idioms (curry favour, strike a chord) to less conventional notions such as
grammatical collocation (linking grammatical items with lexical items, as in
phrasal verbs refer to, answer for) and de-lexical verbs (have a break, take a
decision). Many of these patterns can be seen to obey underlying lexical
relationships. The notion has recently been applied to a much wider category
of expression following work in corpus analysis, including semantic prosody
(clusters of semantically related words: push through [a reform, a project, a
law...]), collocational frameworks (lexical and grammatical collocation: not
only... but also, find / make it [easy, difficult, hard, impossible] to + clause)
and colligation (collocation between grammatical categories, e.g. the set of
nouns that can introduce NP complement clauses: the idea, conviction, belief,
thought that). These patterns demonstrate the close correlation between
syntax and semantics and are seen as a confirmation of Halliday’s (1985)
notion of a lexico-grammar: a theory of lexis and grammar as an interrelated
continuum rather than as separate levels.

So far we have seen collocations as ‘statistical / textual’ co-occurrences on

the one hand or as ‘semantic / syntactic’ patterns on the other. However, it is
possible not only to examine the internal syntagmatic properties of an
expression, but also the pragmatic role of the expression in text and
discourse. A third tendency therefore is to examine collocations in terms of
performance, in other words from a discoursal / rhetorical point of view.
From this perspective, idioms such as to get the sack, to be fired can be
contrasted stylistically with less marked expressions: to be dismissed, to lose
one’s job. The difference between these expressions lies in their emphasis or
rhetorical effect, as Moon (1987) and Fernando (1996) have argued. From a
discourse analyst’s perspective, Moon feels justified in arguing that syntactic
and semantic constraints on fixed expressions are not as important as
rhetorical function:

In general, studies of fixed expressions [...] concentrate on their typological

and syntagmatic properties. Attention is given to such things as the degree
of their lexical and syntactic frozenness, or their transformation potential:
and even the primary characteristic of idioms, their non-compositionality as
lexical units, may be seen as a matter of the interpretation of a syntagm.
However, it is their paradigmatic properties which are of importance in

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

relation to interaction. Fixed expressions represent meaningful choices on

the part of the speaker / writer. (Moon 1994:117).

Fillmore and Atkins (1994) and Kay and Fillmore (1999) have similarly
questioned the need for a distinction between idiom and collocation on the
grounds of syntactic and semantic frozenness. Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor
emphasised the fact that collocations are culturally salient items which need
to be learnt as part of the language. According to their well-known definition,
fixed expressions are:

[…] phenomena larger than words, which are like words in that they have to
be learned separately as individual facts about pieces of the language, but
which also have grammatical structure [and] interact in important ways with
the rest of the language. (Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor 1988:501)

In a similar approach, Pawley and Syder have been influential in the area of
language learning theory, and were among the first to emphasise that
conversational gambits in natural speech were speech acts organised around
fixed expressions of the type it’s easy to talk (a reprimand for some
criticism), she’s busy right now (denying access by telephone) and I thought
you’d never ask (expressing relief after permission has been granted)
(1983:307). They pointed out that these expressions are effectively social
institutions, and have specific cultural functions in the language:

A lexicalized sentence stem is a unit of clause length or longer whose

grammatical form or lexical context is wholly or largely fixed; its elements
form a standard label for a culturally recognized concept, a term in the
language. Although lexicalized in this sense, most such units are not true
idioms but rather are regular form-meaning pairings. (Pawley and Syder
1983:191-192).

This theme was similarly examined by Yorio, whose analysis of a spoken

corpus found few traditional idioms, but instead proposed that sentence stems
are key to understanding conventionalised fluency in language. Yorio
concludes that grammatical accuracy must be matched by a knowledge of
such idiomatic expressions:

Idiomaticity, or native-like quality in written language, appears to be a

property characterized primarily by the presence of collocations and / or
sentence stems rather than by actual idioms. [...] [A]lthough fluency is
possible without grammatical accuracy, idiomaticity is not. Idiomaticity
then becomes an excellent indicator of bilingual system proficiency and, as
such, it deserves to be further studied and understood. (Yorio 1989:68)
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Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) examined shorter stretches of language than

the sentence stem, and related knowledge of phraseology to a system of
rhetorical expressions (1992:22). Following Coulmas (1979), they situated
collocations within a continuum of increasing rhetorical force: from low to
high impact. Nattinger and DeCarrico identified collocations as unmarked
choices of expression ‘[co-occurring lexical items] that have not been
assigned particular pragmatic functions by pragmatic competence’ (1992:36).
This ‘unmarked’ sense of the term collocation is an interesting departure
from the perspectives we have seen above and clearly delimits the
syntagmatic definition of collocation from a discoursal one. Nattinger and
DeCarrico then contrast unmarked collocations with lexical phrases, defined
as ‘marked’ collocations, in that they have recognised pragmatic functions.
Lexical phrases are split into two groups (1992:38-42):

• Lexical units which do not allow paradigmatic or syntagmatic

reformulation: polywords: for the most part, as it were and institutionalised
phrases how are you? what, me worry?
• Grammatical frameworks with both fixed and free features: short range
phrasal constraints: a NP [time] ago, long range sentence builders: I think
(that) [proposition clause X], the ADJ-er [proposition clause X], the ADJ-
er [proposition clause Y].

The lexical phrase is proposed as an addition to the traditional distinction

between idiom and collocation, and emphasises textual function rather than
internal form:

Lexical phrases are parts of language that often have clearly defined roles in
guiding the overall discourse. In particular, they are the primary markers
which signal the direction of discourse, whether spoken or written. When
they serve as discourse devices, their function is to signal, for instance,
whether the information to follow is in contrast to, in addition to or is an
example of information that it to proceed. (Nattinger and DeCarrico
1992:60)

According to Winter’s (1977) theory of clause relations, information in

discourse is frequently managed lexically. Nattinger and DeCarrico show that
this operates at a phrasal level by the use of global topic markers (let’s look
at), shifters (OK, now) and summarisers (so then), as well as at a local level
by the use of exemplifiers (how about X?), relators (it has to do with Y),
qualifiers (the catch is that…), asides (where was I?) and so on. Such
expressions are typical of the spoken language, but we see below that science

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

writing has developed a sophisticated system for similar functions (including

asides and topic shifters), albeit with different linguistic expressions. While
such features may not be statistically significant across the corpus, and
therefore do not usually figure in corpus-based analyses of register, Nattinger
and DeCarrico claim that such phraseology has a significant role to play in
the rhetorical construction of the text. These claims are supported by related
studies on the pragmatic function of idioms in texts (Popiel and McRae 1988,
Luzon-Marco 1999)
The ‘discourse / rhetorical’ approach is not concerned with lexis and
grammar as such. Instead, the suggestion is that collocations and idioms can
be distinguished on the basis of a rhetorical or textual function (as argued by
Nattinger and DeCarrico) or pragmatic marking (as argued by Moon). We
have seen above that most idioms - such as sell like hot cakes (to sell quickly)
and pull a fast one (to deceive by stealth) - are more marked stylistically than
their typical paraphrases, not just for emphasis, but often with very specific
information and a limited context of possible use. Moon has suggested that
many such idioms and metaphors are deliberately used in speech and writing
to bring in shades of evaluation or judgement in comparison with their
unmarked equivalents (thus the trial progressed at a snail’s pace would
signal subjective feeling more explicitly than the trial progressed slowly).
But as Moon points out, these ‘prototypical’ idioms are rarely found in
authentic texts. In practice, the most commonly recurring expressions are
likely to be ‘lexical phrases’ or ‘sentence stems’ and it is worth noting that
apart from Nattinger and DeCarrico’s work, these have received much less
attention from lexicologists.
A normal text rarely moves in a clear-cut way from unmarked to marked
expression, with idioms and collocations visibly demarcated. It is more
realistic to picture a text as a sequence of different types of discourse signal,
and while most of these expressions are idiomatic in that they have specific
rhetorical or pragmatic roles to play, they are not marked as such within the
normal reading of the text. Thus while lexical phrases may appear to be
idioms from a traditional lexicological point of view, in their normal context
they are simply part of the accepted phraseology. When something is
‘marked’ or pragmatically unusual, we can assume that it stands out from the
expected style. Indeed, a knowledge of the expected phraseology is central to
being able to step out of it in order to create some supplementary rhetorical
effect. For example, Pawley and Syder’s sentence stems have very specific
and sophisticated rhetorical functions in spoken English: they are natural
candidates for the category of idiom. But it does not make sense to suggest
that they are permanently marked expressions, especially when we consider
that they are commonly used in normal spoken discourse.

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To give another example, the British English greetings How do you do?,
How are you? How do?, How’s it going?, How goes it? Wotcha! etc. vary
from unmarked to marked in different contexts. The native speaker knows the
core items (depending on dialect) and knows implicitly their rhetorical value
in the phraseological system. How do you do? is felt to be the standard
prototypical form, but this does not mean that it is the unmarked, neutral
choice used in the majority of circumstances. The corollary of this is that
prototypical expressions do not correspond to typical expressions. In
addition, a notion of what constitutes ‘collocation’ or ‘idiom’ may also
depend on an appropriate register or style and part of the meaning of an
idiomatic phrase is its specific context of use in which it is deemed to be
appropriate (a pragmatic dimension rather than a strictly textual one). Thus
from a discourse perspective, idioms (as relatively marked expressions) and
collocations (as relatively unmarked expressions) might not be fixed
categories, but may be perceived differently in different contexts.
Collocations can be said to have a less fixed pragmatic set of uses than
idioms; while lexical phrases, with their specific rhetorical roles, occupy a
position somewhere in-between. From this basic premise, we can postulate a
shifting rhetorical continuum between the usual phraseology of collocation
and other more unusual expressions (including original expressions which
break with collocational convention or stylistically marked idioms belonging
to another discourse).

Collocation emerges throughout this discussion as a powerful but also

extremely diverse concept. As van der Wouden (1997) notes, the term
collocation itself either refers to the abstract relationship between words or
the expression as a whole. Nevertheless, it is clear that although there are
differences in application and methodology, all of the approaches we have
summarised above converge on an important and recognisable phenomenon,
the ‘familiar recurrent expression’. Instead of arguing the case for one
specific viewpoint, I attempt to see each as compatible and relevant at
different points in my analysis. Since the main purpose of this book is to
analyse a large corpus of texts, I argue below that the ‘statistical / textual’
perspective is the most appropriate approach to be adopted in the first stages
of corpus analysis. However, the ‘semantic / syntactic’ perspective brings to
our analysis of collocation the important notion of the abstract relationship
between words, and the idea that the expression exists as a meaningful unit of
choice within the grammar. The ‘discoursal / rhetorical’ view equally informs
us of the role that the expression has within a running text and reminds us to
interpret the expression as part of a system of stylistic alternatives. Despite
differences of methods, each approach leads us to reconsider the relationship

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

between words within the collocational expression and to revise the

traditional notion of phraseology.
I intend to use the term phraseology to refer specifically to the rhetorical
or pragmatic use of an expression. The term then stands in contrast to
Halliday’s ‘lexico-grammar’ which refers strictly to the cline between lexis
on the one hand and grammatical systems on the other (Halliday 1985). The
term also contrasts with the notion of ‘collocational continuum’ in lexicology
(Howarth 1998), which refers to collocations as they become less like phrases
and more like words. The ‘discoursal / rhetorical’ approach claims that the
pragmatic value of a particular expression constitutes an important aspect of
a theory of phraseology. However, few studies of idiom or collocation have
taken this perspective, and even fewer have attempted to account for systems
of phraseology in scientific texts. My assumption in the analysis below is that
although my collocational expressions are originally derived from the corpus
on a statistical basis, they can be also usefully described in terms of their
textual, rhetorical or pragmatic function. Thus a lexico-grammatical analysis
of a specific discourse can be supplemented by an analysis of phraseology.
A further issue at this point concerns the notion of grammatical item (a
closed class or functional word) and lexical item (an open class or content
word). In the corpus analysis below, I suggest that grammatical items are
useful starting points for the analysis of longer stretches of collocation and
phraseology. We have seen in the discussion above that grammatical items
have usually been left out of collocational studies. Many studies of textual
collocation such as Phillips (1985) or Smadja (1993) go further and eliminate
‘stop-words’, largely because grammatical items are too frequent in the
corpus and are reasonably thought to ‘collocate with anything’. There is also
a similar tendency in lexicology, in which grammatical items are usually
considered only as collocations of lexical items (as with prepositional and
phrasal verbs). However, as mentioned above, important work by corpus
linguists such as Hunston and Francis (1998) on the patterns of grammar, and
Renouf and Sinclair (1991) on consistent grammatical features of collocation
has shown that grammatical items are fundamental to a theory of
phraseology. The ‘discoursal / rhetorical’ approach has also brought into
focus many previously ignored combinations of grammatical items which
function as recognisable expressions. For example, many of Nattinger and
DeCarrico’s lexical phrases contain, ironically, very few lexical items: just
because, to be at it, as is, that’s it then, it’s all over, he’s out of it. These
expressions are considered to be lexicalised, although they function more like
utterances than single lexical items. Following on from this perspective, the
analysis I set out below focuses on grammatical items as the key elements in
longer stretches of phraseology. In section III, I specifically address the role

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of collocation in specialised texts and set out more fully Halliday’s concept
of the lexico-grammar.
The notion that grammatical items are closed class words will serve as my
basic rule-of-thumb in order to identify these items. However, I also wish to
explore the possibility that high frequency items (such as auxiliary verbs is
and has) play an important role in the formation of collocations and fixed
expressions, and assume therefore that such high frequency items are for the
purposes of my analysis ‘grammatical’. This frequency-based approach to
lexis is consistent with Sinclair’s view, and allows for a more nuanced
analysis of words which are often considered to be at the intersection
between grammar and lexis.

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

II. Language and Science

This chapter sets the scene for the corpus design in section III and data
analysis in section IV. The aim here is to justify my specific object of enquiry
(science writing in cancer research) and my methodology (an approach
within discourse analysis). I set out here the theoretical basis for a corpus
analysis of cancer research articles. I explain briefly the relationship between
science and language from the point of view of terminology and then from
linguistics (especially genre analysis). In order to put the research article
genre in context, I then discuss a specific discourse community: the
Pharmaceutical Sciences Department, Aston University.
The language of science is a fruitful and well-documented area of
research, most notably in philosophy, sociology and linguistics. The role of
language in science was the object of enquiry of philosophers concerned with
hermeneutics and the reflective function of science (Gadamer, Wittgenstein
and Foucauld) as well as theories of knowledge and scientific epistemology
(Bachelard, Piaget and Kuhn). In sociology there has been much research on
the discourse of science in relation to science policy and the public
understanding of science. There is particular interest in the ways in which
technical issues are affected by economics, politics and personal agendas
(Kevles 1995 sets out a comprehensive history of the discourse of cancer
research). For the most part, research on science writing in linguistics has
been the realm of applied linguistics, in particular the divergent fields of
terminology and discourse analysis. The two approaches can be summarised
as follows:

1) Terminology centres on the theoretical relationship between the specialist

subject and language. The object of enquiry is that of Languages for Special
Purposes (LSP), defined in terms of specialist topic rather than style or other
linguistic characteristics (Sager et al. 1980, Sager 1990). The field of
terminology has a strong rationalist tradition, derived from its origins in the
creation of industrial and scientific standards. Terminologists are often
scientists themselves, including proof-readers, editors, abstractors,
translators, termographers (builders of term banks and indexes) and
information scientists (text-engineers).

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2 ) Discourse analysis discusses the activity of science writing and the role of
language use among specialists. Applied research on scientific discourse is
known as English for Specific Purposes (ESP: Swales 1981b,1990), with the
emphasis being on the problems associated with the use of a specific national
language (English) in international science. In applied linguistics, ESP and
‘English for Academic Purposes’ have become widely recognised fields of
research, with dedicated academic journals (English for Specific Purposes,
ESPecialist, Fachsprache, Anglais de Spécialité). Many specialist areas have
come under scrutiny, especially in the medical sciences and areas such as
doctor-patient dialogue and the popularisation of science. The field has
several theoretical traditions, and applications tend to centre on language
teaching.

The historical distinctions between terminology and discourse analysis are

beyond the scope of this book, but what is of interest here is the way in which
language is seen either in relation to the subject matter (the special language:
a terminological perspective) or in relation to the scientific activity (the
specific language: a discourse perspective). In the following sections, I
explain these two positions.

1. The Terminology of Science

Scientific and technical terminology is often cited as a powerful factor for

change in language. To take a basic example, the number of new chemicals
created in English (recognised by the international standards organisations
such as IUPAC) far outstrips the number of words commonly recognised in
the language as a whole. In organic chemistry alone, there are 750 000
compounds and four million standard terms (including affixes) and a further
30 000 terms in inorganic chemistry (Sager et al. 1980:230). This count does
not include the many other terms that are created ad hoc within texts, as
Thomas (1993) points out.
Terminologists create and define specialist terms, most often with legal
status, for example in the statutory use of patents. From the point of view of
linguistics, the naming of terms is an attempt to fix semantic universals and
situate semantic relations within a paradigm or hierarchy. The notion of
paradigm distinguishes a terminology (a collection of terms related by an
underlying system, most usually within a specific discipline) from a
dictionary. The technical notion of term and its underlying concept is
therefore distinguished from the lexical word or name. The key area of
terminology however is the definition, ‘the verbal description of a concept’

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

(Picht and Draskau 1985:65). Systems of definitions present a complex area

of research and Picht and Draskau summarise the dynamics of definition in
terms of internal or external dimensions. Logical definitions of internal or
intensional characteristics (an entity’s shape, colour and other ‘independent’
properties) can be placed alongside an analogical definition of external
characteristics or extension (the term’s associated purpose or functions)
(1985:47). The matter is complicated by the fact that an established concept
in one discipline can be interpreted differently in another. For example, the
iron chloride molecule FeCl3 is important for electricians as well as textile
technologists, but has a different definition (extension) in both fields (Sager
et al. 1980:72). As we note in our survey below, biochemists, micro-
biologists and pharmacologists have a very different perspectives of the
central concept of cancer.
Beyond the mechanical stockpiling of terms, the process of creating
terminology itself has an impact on the rest of the language system. In a
major work on the notion of nomenclature, Cahn (1979) noted that all words
in the general language could potentially be pressed into service in science
and technology using conventional resources such as conversion. For
example the noun clone can become a technical verb to clone and then be re-
introduced into the general language. Scientific derivation also adapts the
morphology of the language in order to create subject-specific neologisms.
The derivational systems of Greek and Latin are fully employed in English
and provide a complex system of fine distinctions. In chemistry the form -ic
indicates more oxygen bonds, as in sulphuric acid (H2SO4), and contrasts
with -ate, used to refer to sulphate SO4 with a valency-2 ion. These can in
turn be contrasted with –ous, which indicates a decreased number of oxygen
bonds as in sulphurous acid (H2SO3) (Scott 1991:272-278).
Lexical derivation takes the form of compounding, in which words are
juxtaposed by leaving a space or hyphen between individual elements.
Compounding involves the formation of complex nominals, and this process
of term creation has had profound effects on the syntax of English, as noted
by Huddleston (1971), Lackstrom et al. (1972, 1973) and more recently by
Halliday (1998). Huddleston noted that scientific English has four major
nominal categories: adjectival compounds (compressive force), verbal nouns
(air-conditioning, town planning), de-verbal compounds (dust collection),
and operation compounds (a grammatical reformulation, for example
temperature change from a change of temperature). Sager et al. (1980:268-
269) similarly identified the complex semantic interactions between the noun
phrase head and its modifier. They established ten dominant categories of
lexical collocation in English:

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1) head compared with the modifier ethane-type interaction.

2) head made of a specified material oil film.
3) head has a new property low octane.
4) head has a specific use cutting tool.
5) head is associated with its product or origin malt beer.
6) head operates on the modifier: enzyme reactivator.
7) head operates as specified by the modifier sliding key.
8) head is part of the modifier pedestal cap.
9) head is identified by the modifier gold standard.
10) head ‘takes place at’ the modifier cytokine tumour.

We can see that collocational systems in scientific terminology are

particularly complex. Terminologists have demonstrated that there is an
underlying grammar at stake in science writing, a view which serves to
counteract the folk-view of terminology as simply the classification of terms
and taxonomies. However, although this is an important and difficult field of
research, terminology still tends to prioritise the complex nature of nominals
and lexical collocations. More recent work has however concentrated on
semi-technical terms, words such as analysis, effect, transformation (Baker,
Francis and Tognini-Bonelli 1993), on general words borrowed by hard
science such as charm, strange, up, down (Pavel 1993 a / b) and the
collocational properties of verbs and verb complementation in science
writing (Thomas 1993, Pearson 1998). These developments in terminology
do not however address the concept of discourse or varying style within the
research article genre, since terminology is only concerned with the specialist
subject matter. Terminology is essentially about managing the terms and
concepts of a scientific discipline, and the issue of style is, perhaps
reasonably, a matter of less importance. As a consequence, research in
terminology therefore centers on attempts to delimit the ‘Language for
Special Purposes’, either by seeing LSP as a system of terms, or by seeing
LSP as a very abstract and specialised language variety.
By limiting the meaning of LSP to a system of terms, Picht and Draskau
represent a traditional but also fairly widespread view of language and
science. Picht and Draskau see the difference between the LSP and the
general language as a continuum of abstraction:

Depending on the pragmatic function and the context of situation, including

an epistemological factor, the same topic within a special field lends itself
to discussion at different levels of abstraction. (Picht and Draskau 1985:5)
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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

Contrary to the common-sense view that terminology tends to be about

‘specificity’, Picht and Draskau note that abstraction implies an increased
level of conceptual generality. Thus while ‘Cologne Cathedral’ indicates a
specific real world object (denoted by a name), the concept CATHEDRAL is
abstracted away from outside reference to a generic idea (denoted by a term).
Abstraction is reflected in the characteristic nominal style of the LSP, while
the general language has ‘a zero level of abstraction’ (following Ure 1971,
they claim that this corresponds to a lower lexical density). Picht and
Draskau further characterise the LSP as ‘monofunctional’, in that it cannot be
understood by the lay person, is restricted to exclusive groups and is seen as a
non-essential variety in the wider community (1985:10-11). The implication
of this is that the terminological system is synonymous with the LSP and that
the difference between an LSP and an even more abstract artificial language
(a non-linguistic form of representation involving algebra and chemical
formulae) is one of degree. This use of the term LSP is similar to that of
sublanguage, a concept also originating from the field of terminology
(Lehrberger 1982) but also widely used in corpus linguistics (Barnbrook
1996).

However an alternative view has emerged, in which the central concept of the
term has been challenged, and the ‘special’ nature of the LSP has been
eroded, largely because of the increasing tendency for sciences to become
interdisciplinary. The emphasis has turned instead to ‘knowledge-banks’
rather than ‘term-banks’ (Papegaaij and Schubert 1988, Thomas 1993). Many
terminologists see the LSP as a variety of the general language, its difference
lying in functionality rather than abstraction or degree of specialism.
Following the functional linguists Hjelmslev, Bühler and Halliday, Sager,
Dungworth and McDonald (1980) consider the function of terminology and
the LSP within a system of discourses. Science writing is defined not just in
terms of conceptual abstraction, but in terms of its relation to different types
of discourse, and to different structures of knowledge. Firstly, conceptual
discourse is concerned with reference beyond the environment of the text
into the abstract conceptual world of scientific knowledge. Perceptual
discourse on the other hand, involves reference to the immediate physical and
temporal context of the text itself. Finally, metalinguistic discourse
(including extratextual comment) is said to untypical of scientific text and is
a resource that appears to fade away as the language becomes increasingly
graphic and conceptual. Sager et al. also make an interesting distinction
between the LSP and register (in the Hallidayan sense). Halliday uses
register to refer to the traditional ‘modes of discourse’ such as the language

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of narrative, the language of transaction, the language of exposition which

are not types of texts but rhetorical events which emerge in a long stretch of
running text or dialogue (1985:318). Sager et al. instead point out that while
register is a useful term for forms of interaction between different discourse
communities (between journalists and non-journalists, for example), the LSP
exists and evolves within the discourse of a specific scientific community
(1980:4).
Although terminology is often seen as the analysis of fixed concepts,
Sager et al. emphasise the changing and dynamic nature of scientific patterns
of thought. Science innovates and forms new paradigms, making a high
demand on the terminological resources of language (1980:xviii). They
distinguish between conceptualisation, the attempt to fix and define concepts,
and reconceptualisation which involves the changing functional perspective
of concepts and terms from discipline to discipline and text to text. The term
‘sun’, for example, is conceptualised differently in different discourses:

a- You can’t see that bird because of the sun (perceptual)

b- The sun is a star. (conceptual)
c- The Germanic word ‘sun’ is a noun (metalinguistic).

Reconceptualisation can also be seen in the changes of expression that take

place within the same text. Broadly speaking, this functionalist approach
leads to a view of language as not only the encoding of knowledge but as a
primary tool in the negotiation of claims and the development of scientific
paradigms. From a similar perspective, Béjoint (1988:365) sets out to
question the fixedness of terminology and conceptualisation. He inverts the
terminologists’ traditional metaphor of the ‘constellation of concepts’ to
make the observation that as one’s viewpoint changes, so the conceptual
constellations undergo a shift in perspective. Béjoint examines the
characteristics of scientific and technical words that are often claimed to hold
true by terminologists (1988:358):

• Scientific terms follow a chain of definition from LGP words to LSP terms.
• Scientific terms enjoy an absence of ambiguity in context and out of
context.
• Scientific terms avoid figurative or metaphorical meanings.
• Scientific terms have origins that can be definitely traced.

Béjoint asks whether such terms as key idea pointer, bone tissue or bacterial
culture can be considered unambiguous out of context, can ever be traced
back to original definitions or usages, or can be held as un-metaphorical.
Béjoint challenges the underlying assumption that greater precision can be
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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

defined out of context, a point that appears to contradict many scientists,

professional translators and terminological commissions (such as the
International Standards Organisation). His key point, however, is that the
process of terminological definition is circular, and this touches at the heart
of the rational nature of naming and nomenclature in science. These
comments are echoed by Godman and Payne (1981:24), who point out that
the very idea of an idealised knowledge structure is exposed to the same flux
and uncertainty that is prevalent in the general language. Thus the meaning of
a term is dependent on its position relative to other terms and its use in the
text, rather than a fixed abstract definition. Béjoint’s position is well-known
and has led to a greater emphasis on textual evidence in terminology. Thomas
(1993) and Pearson (1998) in particular have demonstrated that a corpus of
texts is useful in order to gain contextual information about specific terms, a
methodology also exploited in experiments with automatic translation
(Schubert 1986). Although their aims are different to those pursued in this
book (they are interested in the definition or translation of terms rather than
the style of science writing), their methods demonstrate that the concept of
collocation is more established in terminological work than in other areas of
linguistics.

This discussion leads us to examine the scientific text itself and its role in the
formation of terminology. The Canadian linguist Pavel (1993 a / b) has
emphasised the role of the research article in the formation of terminology.
She postulates that terminological change is contrary to stereotypes
unplanned and opportunistic, and largely emerges from the processes of
scientific writing itself. Other linguists (such as Linstromberg 1991) have
noted that metaphor is a key feature of science writing. In addition, Vidalenc
(1997) points out that the ‘natural language’ philosophers preferred simple
metaphors such as Aristotle’s substitutions and comparisons or Austin’s
speech acts. Salager-Meyer (1990a:354) argues that metaphors can become
dominant in specific research areas. She reports that 70% of head nouns in
medical terminology tend to be metaphorical collocations involving
structures (nerve roots, abdominal walls) while the rest involve processes,
functions and relations (migratory pain, vehicles of infection). In addition,
terminologists such as Koch (1991) and Pavel see the particular choice of a
metaphor as vital in the long-term chances of survival of a specific term, a
neo-Darwinian notion evoked by such writers as Cavalli-Sforza and Felman
(1989) on the cultural evolution of discourse and Chesterman (1997) in his
discussion of collocations and memes as translation units.
Pavel specifically examines the effects of interdisciplinary research in the
terminology of fractal science. Since fractal imagery is largely adapted as

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metaphor from everyday language, its terminology is particularly transparent

to non-experts. Pavel and Boileau’s (1994) book of fractal terms not only
contains definitions but also typical collocations and synonyms of the main
entries. Pavel and Boileau thus very clearly identify semantic criteria as
consistent features of syntactic patterns (similar to the ‘semantic / syntactic’
perspective discussed above). For example, compound noun phrases display
inclusion (N + N = particle-cluster), adjective + noun phrases exhibit gradual
‘superordinates’ (chiral chemical compound), intransitive N + V collocations
show specialisation in the verb (the product crystallises) and V + N patterns
typically display an empirical measure or directionality (conserve scale)
(1993b: 5). They interpret these patterns as significant constraints in the
formation of new terminology, and argue for their inclusion in dictionaries
and term-banks. As Béjoint and Thoiron point out, it is more interesting for
the non-expert to know the typical processes and agents involved with a
certain term than to know which grammatical category it belongs to:

S’agissant par exemple, du domaine de l’immunologie, il est plus

intéressant pour le traducteur ou le rédacteur de connaître les différents
acteurs du processus de défense immunitaire, ainsi que leur mode de
fonctionnement, que de savoir à quelle catégorie grammaticale ils
appartiennent. (1992:8)

Thus the role of the terminologist has moved from providing definitions and
basic grammatical features to setting out a phraseology of meaning. Besides
constituting patterns of particular importance in the conceptualisation of
fractal imagery, Pavel considers the role of these collocations within the text.
Her claim is that new formulations effectively reconstruct the terminological
knowledge structure of science. As new phrases become neologisms and
accepted terms, these in turn bring along their own suite of associated
metaphors, sometimes from different disciplines. Pavel refers to these
metaphors as LSP collocations (1993a:29). She recalls the example of the
theatre in one model of artificial intelligence (namely: Schank and Abelson
1977), where terms such as ‘scripts’, ‘actors’, ‘thematic roles’, ‘frames’ and
‘props’ help to conceptualise the brain as ‘a theater of mental representations’
(1993a:25). Such terms not only permit analogy in creating a new conceptual
space, but more importantly they bring along the phraseological patterns
from their original context. These terms are initiated, negotiated and finally
accepted by the wider scientific community:

...new turns of phrase generate meaning, condense into stable expressions

of those meanings and become first synonymous neologisms, and then
terms that give birth to new terms. (1993a:29)
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Thus fixed collocations are instances of established terminology, to be

contrasted with expressions which represent new claims and are more
negotiable, or ‘up for grabs’. Reversing the process, as scientific metaphors
and new collocations (such as ‘black hole’, ‘primal soup’, ‘gene pool’) are
disseminated into popular culture, the new term implies an accompanying
belief system. This to- and-fro of concepts, with attendant belief structures, is
encapsulated by what Pavel terms the thematic proposition (1993a:30). The
term therefore comes with its own intellectual baggage, and can be seen to
infect the knowledge structure of science as well as reflect it:

...languages are seen not only as social tools that human communities have
created and are continually refining for communication purposes, but also
as agents that constantly condition individual behaviour by virtue of social
interaction in historically, geographically, and culturally defined settings.
(Pavel 1993a:23)

Pavel’s empirical and theoretical observations on the lexicon of fractal

science are a useful glimpse into the work that has been carried out in the
field of terminology. Terms are no longer seen as just highly technical words
with fixed meanings. Even in the traditional view, terminology is seen as
contingent and dependent on the conventions of specific disciplines. It
appears that terms need to be grounded in their subject-specific and textual
context just as much as they require precise definition. In addition, general
words and fixed phrases can be equally used as specialist terms, and terms
can be interchanged between experts and the community at large. Pavel’s
LSP collocations provide us with a metaphor for expressions with some
value: they are created in texts and compete for the attention of readers and
scientists. The concept of the collocation also turns out to be a useful
intermediary between the word and the text. They also appear to bring along
their own conceptual paradigms. The concept of a dynamic terminology
therefore provides us with a useful link between the rational approach of
terminology and the empirical perspective of discourse analysis.

2. The Discourse of Science

Even Descartes, that great and passionate advocate of method and certainty,
is in all his writings an author who uses the means of rhetoric in a
magnificent fashion. There can be no doubt about the fundamental function
of rhetoric within social life. But one may go further, in view of the
ubiquity of rhetoric, to defend the primordial claims of rhetoric over against

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modern science, remembering that all science that would wish to be of

practical usefulness at all is dependent on it. (Gadamer 1976:68)

The terminological approach to language suggests that the way in which a

specialist subject matter is reflected in language is central to the
understanding of science. The discourse approach leads us in a fundamentally
different direction: to examine the relationship between scientific texts and
the goals and practices of scientists in their working environment, in other
words the discourse of science. The term discourse is used to imply that
while style, lexis and grammar are important tangible features of science
writing, they also function as pragmatic choices within a specific discourse.
The term ‘discourse of science’ therefore emphasises the role of rhetoric in
science and sees linguistic interaction, especially the privileged genre of the
research article, as a central mechanism in the development of scientific
ideas.
Discourse analysis is concerned with a number of issues, not least of
which the means by which texts are formed, and the role texts play within
specialist disciplines and in the wider social context. Rather than seeing
language as a vehicle for scientific abstractions, discourse analysis views
language as a barometer of the social and professional context from which it
emerges, changing as the social variables, textual conventions or topic
change. Swales (1998) has recently argued that to examine the context of
science is to understand the working practices of research, including the
world outside the laboratory. Scientific texts are written specifically by
scientists interpreting data, attending conferences, submitting articles to
refereed journals, keeping up with the specialist literature. But these texts are
also ultimately a result of scientific programs of research backed by charities,
corporations and governments. Even the most mathematical scientific paper
leaves traces of human involvement at every stage of its production and
represents thousands of choices of presentation, expression and content. The
astronomy journal Celestial Mechanics, for example, is dominated by
mathematical argumentation and algebraic formulae, punctuated by the
occasional ‘but’ and ‘and also’. Yet the titles and abstracts in this journal are
written in natural English: clearly language has an important persuasive
function in the efficient presentation of arguments and data, even where the
scientists might claim that ‘the facts speak for themselves’.
The context of the scientific text is clearly important, but an emphasis on
context still implies that language is peripheral and used in a mechanistic or
representational way. The information view of language, posited by
rationalist theorists such as Escarpit (1976) implies that language is
unchanged from one context to the next: science transcends language, and
language simply provides a universal conduit which may be by-passed in
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favour of other systems. Language is thus seen as an encoding and decoding

device for atomistic information. But this view is incompatible with what we
know about written texts in scientific communities. In one of the best known
studies of science writing, Latour and Woolgar (1986) demonstrated the
subjectivity of science: how scientists need to be persuaded of scientific
innovation and were concerned as much with the status and reliability of their
informants as with the conceptual validity of their findings. This was the one
of first studies to assert the key role of the academic research article in the
dissemination of scientific ideas. However, the distorting effect that science
has on language is not just evidence of the importance of form over content.
Halliday (1998) has argued that scientific activity creates new forms of
language over time, and this is necessary in order to express new meanings
and to propagate ideas outside the scientific community. Halliday and Martin
(1993) have proposed that not only do the social external factors involved in
the production of texts have to be taken into consideration, but something of
the symbolic (semiotic) status of the text plays a role in the creation of
scientific knowledge. This is the approach typically adopted by neo-Firthian
linguists in their analysis of scientific texts (including Myers 1990, Ventola
1991, Mauranen 1991, Halliday and Martin 1993). The Firthian approach to
language differs from mainstream descriptive linguistics in that it interprets
language as a function of society and sees language as fundamental in the
construction of human knowledge. This is clearly a model that addresses the
concerns of the ESP researcher as well as the terminologist.
In his study of the processes of re-editing in science, Myers (1990) pointed
out that in most fields ranging from the philosophy of science, to cultural
studies and the sociology of science, there is a constructivist consensus that
language or society effectively creates knowledge. From the perspective of
epistemology, scientific truth cannot be anything but ‘rooted’ in its culture,
and language is seen to play an important role in framing scientific thought.
Relativist and hermeneutic philosophy (Wittgenstein 1957, Heidegger 1966,
Gadamer 1976) rejects the idea that language can represent conceptual truth
values, instead claiming that knowledge is contingent and subjective within
the historical frames of reference of natural language. The natural language
philosophers (Austin 1962, Searle 1969 and Grice 1975) also came to reject
truth values, and instead established a framework for the fields of pragmatics
and discourse analysis (Verschueren 1999). They saw meaning as
conventionalised in language rather than referentially encoded in it, and
argued that the criterion for good science is not its ability to express truth
values but the extent to which it can be understood within natural language.
A similar view of language use was elaborated by Lévi-Strauss (1962) and
Barthes (1966) in the semiotic construction of social mythology. Semiotics

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emerged from Saussure’s theory of meaning as a relationship within a

structural code rather than as the property of external truth or reality. From
this background Foucauld (1972) was to question the way certain areas of
science (psychiatry and clinical medicine) regulate knowledge in relation to
other disciplines and establish their own coherence as institutions.
Importantly, Foucauld saw discourse as central to scientific practice.
If the Firthian linguistic approach shares this perspective, it is in the idea
that language is the place not only for the construction of conventional
meanings, but also as the medium for the binding of social relations. As Firth
says:

We must apprehend language events in their contexts as shaped by the

creative acts of speaking persons. (Firth 1957:190)

While collocation and contextual meaning have been the trademarks of

Firth’s approach, his ideas have also been influential in theories of scientific
text, especially in the work of M. Halliday. Whereas other approaches
(cognitive, sociological, ethno-cultural) see language as a reflection of mental
processes or social context, Halliday sees discourse as a social context in and
of itself. Halliday claims that the influence of scientific writing extends well
beyond the confines of discourse communities. He sees science as a discourse
which competes with others for attention and dominance in industrialised
societies. Halliday and Martin (1993) propose a marxian view of science,
characterising scientific discourse as part of an authoritative system of social
control, as did Foucauld in his governmentalist theory, as well as many
philosophers in the context of science such as Godley, Guba and Lincoln and
Saville-Troike. Halliday and Martin have drawn attention to the pervasive
effects of scientific practices on our everyday language and to the alienating
effect of science on those who have not been trained to handle the discourse.
Halliday distances himself however from constuctivism: ‘the unreal choice
between language expresses reality and language creates reality (Halliday
1991:59). Instead, language is seen as a scientific tool for getting at reality.
His aim is therefore not to deny scientific values, but to decode scientific
discourse and make the discourse accessible in education, a goal shared by
other neo-Firthian linguists (for example, Drury 1991, Derewianka 1994).
A text is bound therefore to be a discourse, it cannot be disassociated from
its context (as in formal grammars) and cannot be considered to be simply a
grammatical realisation of a set of propositions (as suggested by
textgrammarians such as de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981:89). Halliday
emphasises discourse as the product of simultaneous interaction and
communication:

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As performers and receivers, we simultaneously both communicate through

language and interact through language; and as a necessary condition for
both of these we create and recognise discourse... (Halliday 1977:165).

A functionalist account of the language of science does not make a

distinction between a ‘special language’ (LSP) or the general language. The
concept of ‘special’ is seen as questionable, and Halliday refers to the broad
category of register as well as ‘restricted languages’ which appear to have
limited social functions (games, greetings, recipes). As far as Halliday and
Martin (1993) are concerned, the essential difference is simply between
scientific discourse and other, competing discourses, although science writing
has a superior cultural position. Similarly, the so-called monofunctional
theory (Picht and Draskau 1985), which characterises the LSP as a language
of abstraction, falls foul of much research in the context of science. For
example, Godley (1993) observes that the terminological system of chemistry
is often redundant and arbitrary (not to say ambiguous), with characteristics
that differ from one specialism to another and between different countries. In
chemistry, for example there is debate about whether metals should be the
‘heads’ of noun phrases or the other way round (thus meaning that valency is
reflected in modifiers). In addition, editors and writers make considerable
efforts to explain local conventions and much of the chemical research article
(especially Introduction sections) can be seen as a reformulation for the
benefit of outsiders. This kind of evidence challenges the image of precision
and uniqueness that is imagined in a theory of abstraction. It appears instead
to support the observations of Kuhn, Foucauld, Kevles, Knorr-Cetina and
others that scientific knowledge is pragmatically conflictual and planned
rather than inherently consensual and self-evident.

Discourse analysts therefore reject the term ‘special’ in LSP, and refer
instead to terms such as variety (Richards and Schmidt 1983). A variety is
commonly seen as a type of language which varies within a general system,
and there is no implication that it is limited in function to a specialism or set
apart from what is considered to be the general language system. As such it
serves as a generic term. Much work on scientific writing however has been
conducted on the basis of the LSP (as we have seen in terminology). Other
terms have come to be used for specific texts including ‘register’ (Halliday
1966, Biber 1996), ‘genre’ (Swales 1990), ‘text type’ (de Beaugrande and
Dressler 1981:85), ‘sublanguage’ (Lehrberger 1982, McEnery and Wilson
1996) and ‘special text unit’ (Sager et al. 1980). As might be expected, none
of these terms is exactly interchangeable and each carries with it a different
view of the relation between the general language and the specific variety.

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Sager et al.’s ‘special text unit’ demonstrates the problems that emerge
when linguists attempt to pin down the variable features of texts. In this
functionalist model, the primary functions of texts are broken down into
categories: status and topic. ‘Status’ is determined by the knowledge
structure which a text aims to represent and modify. ‘Aspect’ is subcategory
of status: the use to which the text is to be put (administrative, pedagogical,
descriptive...) (Sager et al. 1980:102). ‘Mode’ is a also subcategory of
‘status’, representing formality and planning involved in the text. ‘Topic’
involves participants’ knowledge and level of reference (from specialised to
popular) and also includes ‘field’ (from the very broad field of physics to the
narrower field of nuclear physics). Sager et al. (1980:120) claim that these
dimensions manifest themselves in various prototypical categories or special
text units:

• Essay - focuses on the producer’s appreciation of reality.

• Schedule - essentially topic-centred and list-like.
• Report - tailored to the receiver’s needs.
• Memo - tailored to the receiver’s status.
• Dialogue - interactive and flexible.

For Sager et al. (1980:125), texts are primarily categorised according to

intentions: informative, evaluative, directive and phatic. Most observers
would recognise that purpose accounts for many differences in form. But as
with many textual categories devised by linguists, ‘special text units’ do not
correspond to real texts. In reality, there is no way of exclusively fixing a text
into one or another category. For example, research articles in particular can
be seen to correspond to the first three STUs we see here (essay, schedule
and report).

While Sager et al.’s approach provides us with an intuitively symmetrical

system, more context-dependent models have been advanced. Swales’ theory
of genre analysis has been of the more influential models of scientific
discourse, based on the early work of Latour and Woolgar and on Bachelard
and Foucauld’s conceptions of practice in science. Working in English for
Specific Purposes (ESP), an area which is largely concerned with training
specialists in language teaching (principally in English), Swales (1990) is
recognised as a major initiator of ethnographic approaches to the study of
specialist discourse.
Swales proposed that the linguist should attend to the practices of the
language user, in particular by analysing texts from the point of view of the
specialist and by respecting the terms and values of the specialist community.
Any text that has a value among the scientists or professional group in
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question is termed a genre. The linguistic characteristics of the genre are seen
as secondary to its status in relation to other genres and its value depends on
the institutional framework of the scientists or specialists concerned. These
groups are in turn defined as discourse communities: ‘...socio-rhetorical
networks that form in order to work towards sets of common goals.’
(1990:9). Thus while speech communities are defined by the language they
speak (with different registers and dialects), discourse communities are
defined by what they are talking about (with different genres and jargons).
The discourse community always consists of individuals with different
interests and specialisms, but the group is also defined by a common aims
and the fact that all members are aware of the central issues and debates that
preoccupy the community as a whole, even if they do not actually ascribe to
them all. Political parties, trade unions, professional associations, commercial
companies, government organisations, campaigning lobbies, and voluntary
interest groups are therefore all considered to be discourse communities.
Successful discourse communities evolve efficient mechanisms of interaction
and control. These mechanisms include ‘control of technical vocabulary’ and
the establishment of a professional ‘hierarchy of expertise’ (Swales 1990:32).
The texts used by the group, its genres, are central mechanisms of interaction
within the system and are seen as ‘...the properties of discourse
communities... classes of communicative events which typically possess the
features of stability, [rhetorical] move recognition and so on.’ (1990:9). In
other words, a genre is a particular language practice, a text type with a
variable but implicitly recognised set of linguistic features. Scientific
communities recognise a complex system of genres: text books, review
articles, peer-review articles, research journals, grant proposals, lab reports,
calls for papers, conferences, seminars, newsletters and so on. Unlike other
definitions of genre which we encounter below (Biber 1994, for example),
Swales’ notion of genre implies that there is a discourse community behind it
regardless of linguistic or functional definitions of the text.
The language of the genre is seen as very heavily constrained, at least
from the point of view of rhetorical structure and effect (Swales places less
emphasis on grammar and vocabulary). Swales claims that his analysis of
textual genres ultimately stems from Propp’s (1928) ‘Morphology of the
Folktale’. Folktales work because their readers are familiar with conventional
rhetorical events, so readers expect a damsel in distress (a conventional plot
device) or the couple lived happily ever after (a conventional ending). The
point is that these events have conventionalised (arbitrary) wording, and are
highly restricted in content and outcome. Research articles in science have
similar devices, which Swales terms ‘moves’ (described below). Swales thus
sees the genre as means to an end, fulfilling a definite set of communicative

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purposes (entertaining the audience or selling scientific ideas) and,

importantly, owing its existence to a more or less loose set of rhetorical
structures and labels which have been agreed by the group (fairy tales with a
series of protagonists, review articles with acknowledgements and methods).
It is not necessary for the speech community or the discourse community to
be consciously aware of the exact linguistic features of the genre, but
generally genres are intuitively recognised and agreed concepts. Swales
contrasts genre with register (1990:41) which he defines as a linguistic
definition of a certain text. According to this view, register is a linguistic
category while genre is a social institution.

Swales’ approach has been influential, but it is so different from that of other
linguists that the basic terminology and the theories underlying the different
terms have become confused. The originality of Swales’ analysis is that
genres are defined in relation to other genres, not just by a series of internal
linguistic features or external social functions. This differentiates genre from
sublanguage used as a textual category by several corpus linguists, including
Barnbrook (1996), McEnery and Wilson (1996) and Pearson (1998). As the
term sublanguage itself is derived from terminology rather than discourse
analysis, many of these works are oriented to a linguistic description of
terminology, or tend to analyse very broad categories of text rather than
specific text types. Barnbrook (1996: 122) describes a sublanguage as
having:

1. limited subject matter.

2. lexical, syntactic and semantic restrictions.
3. ‘deviant’ rules of grammar.
4. high frequency of certain constructions.
5. unusual features of text structure.
6. the use of special symbols.

This definition combines features of the LSP or ‘special language’ and the
‘artificial language’ (‘the use of special symbols’) as well as bringing other
important characteristics into the picture (such as unusual features of text
structure and ‘deviant’ grammar).
Rather confusingly, Swales’ view of genre also differs from the work of
Biber and Finegan (1994) where the term register is seen as a social
convention, and conversely genre is seen as a regular set of inter-related
linguistic features. We have also seen that register can be usefully defined as
the text types used to communicate between the discourse community and the
general speech community, a concept that is more in line with Halliday’s
view of register discussed below (Sager et al. 1998). Since Biber’s concept of
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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

register seems at odds with Halliday’s discoursal notion of the term, it is

appropriate at this stage to simply adopt Swales’ notion of genre and
Halliday’s concept of register, noting that these terms are used differently
outside the field of discourse analysis.

The claim advanced in this book is that discourse analysis provides a more
accurate account of the context and grammatical features of language
varieties than the register approach adopted elsewhere (Biber 1994, for
example). In Swales’ analysis, and unlike Biber’s (1986) concept of register
or Barnbrook’s (1996) use of the term ‘sublanguage’, the principle is that the
same grammatical feature may function differently in different contexts. Any
evidence to suggest that certain features function differently in the general
language and the specialist variety tends to undermine Biber’s view of
register, which places a high premium on identifying differing distributions
of linguistic features and grammatical categories. Biber’s ‘multifactorial’
approach has been to analyse large groups of grammatical features (from a
tagged corpus, such as passives and relative clauses) and to correlate their
relative frequency with certain intuitive internal functions of the texts
involved (such as abstraction, narrative structure). This has led to important
work on specialist texts (Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1998). However, this
approach does not account for the fact that the same grammatical features
may be present in two text corpora but function differently, in which case
linguistic cluster analysis is incapable of accounting for these features of the
genre. Swales therefore calls to attention the very specific means by which
specialist discourse appropriates existing linguistic features and changes their
nature. He calls this the discourse coherence of a linguistic feature, and the
principle is derived from Firth’s theory of meaning.
Swales (1981c) fist demonstrated discourse coherence in his analysis of
the past participle in technical English. He found that participles function
mostly to bring the reader’s attention to non-linguistic text (a table, figure or
illustration as in the curve shown, the list given) or are used idiomatically as
premodifiers (as in a given reaction) in a similar way to classifiers as in a
certain reaction. He argued that these uses are particular to scientific
discourse, and have developed a unique function within the research article
genre. I have similarly noted (Gledhill 1995b) that numbers are used
throughout pharmaceutical research articles as ‘pronomials’, replacing
references to long chemical names. This has consequences for the rest of the
pronomial system of the text (especially the range of anaphora, as noted by
Liddy et al. 1987), and presumably implies that pronouns have a different
profile of use in chemistry texts. These examples certainly fit Barnbrook’s
description of ‘unusual features of text structure’ and perhaps also ‘lexical,

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syntactic and semantic restrictions’. The point is however that in the

statistical analysis of register and sublanguage, these features would be
counted and assumed to be similar to usage in the general language.
The fact that fewer pronouns would be used in a chemistry text might be
incorrectly interpreted in a statistical count as an absence of referential
cohesion (an important feature of Biber’s 1996 approach to register analysis).
And although I find below that there are significantly more prepositions in
the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus in relation to the general language (see
Appendix 1), it does not follow that the functions of prepositions in general
English are replicated in the corpus. In one of the first corpus studies of
scientific texts, Sampson and Haigh (1988) found that noun phrases,
prepositional phrases, past participles and non-standard as clauses are more
common in technical writing than in fiction. But it is significant that they
argued against characterising these features as ‘tell-tale constructions’
(1988:218). All of this is of course predicated on the analysis of single,
isolated grammatical features or categories. No study has so far been applied
to the relative interaction of words between genres, and it seems that there is
even more scope for differences between the collocations of scientific
English and General English. My preference for Swales’ ‘genre’ therefore
reflects a concern for the contextual analysis of certain features, and suggests
that even if a feature is equally frequent in two different varieties, its
functions and distribution of use are not necessarily the same. This point is
taken up again in our discussion of the corpus analysis of grammatical items.

Another reason for adopting the genre analysis approach, is that Swales has
established a tradition of analysing research article sections, not just research
articles as a whole. Such attention to ‘subgenres’ has only been tentatively
explored in recent corpus work (Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1998). Before the
introduction of large corpora, Swales (1990:134) showed that rhetorical
sections (Introductions, Methods and so on) have consistent and predictable
rhetorical structures of their own. While the model is well known and has in
many respects been surpassed by later work (Swales 1998), it remains the
first characterisation of science writing that emphasises differences in
wording and style rather than the assumption that the text has a consistent
system of expression throughout. Swales’ work was followed by a number of
studies extending his concepts to the entire research article genre and also
examining different lexico-grammatical features from the point of view of
‘discourse coherence’. In order to give a broad picture of the research article,
I summarise some of these studies below, separating those studies which
examine the research article as a whole from those which explore specific
sections. Since my main method is to analyse the role of collocation from one

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section to the next, it is important to set out here a picture of the general
linguistic properties of each part of the research article in turn. To avoid
confusion subsections of the text (known as rhetorical sections) are
henceforth indicated by an initial capital letter: Title - Abstract - Introduction
- Methods - Results - Discussion.

3 The Research Article Genre

Swales’ work remains the most detailed analysis of the inner workings of the
research article genre. In the context of the massive flow of written data in
science, Swales sees refereed journals as the ‘traffic officers’ (1991:94) of
scientific information: articles are channelled to the appropriate journals on
the basis of how original or significant they are perceived to be in the
discourse community. In the case of the research article each specialism has
its own conventions regarding graphic and textual format as well as devices
for academic accreditation and citation (Swales 1990:6). Despite these
differences, Swales claims that there is a fundamental underlying rhetorical
system.
At the discourse level, Swales identifies a stereotypical rhetorical structure
that is analogous to the knowledge structures of Schank and Abelson’s
(1977) scripts and Van Dijk and Kintsch’s (1989) textual macrostructure. In
particular, Swales (1981a, 1990) proposes that the rhetorical structure of
Introductions in research articles from a series of different specialisms can be
characterised by a macrostructure of one global purpose: to create a research
space (the CARS model). This aim is realised in obligatory and optional
stages in the argumentation of the text that Swales terms Moves (obligatory)
and Steps (optional) (1990:137). Since moves are rhetorical in nature they
represent a summary of many different pathways that the argument of a text
can go through. The first move, for example, ‘establish a territory’ is made up
of a series of steps which introduce specific areas of the research field as
important and relevant to the study, as well as stating the general topic of the
study and items of previous literature.
The linguistic features of move 1 include time references to previous
research (adjuncts of time such as recently, and use of the present perfect),
evaluative statements of importance or interest to the field (it is well-known
that) (1990:144) or, specifically in step 2 statements of amount or quality of
evidence established in the field (1990:145). In step 3 the linguistic
resources consist of a specification of previous findings followed by a
temporal qualification, reporting phrases (was found to be) or reporting verbs
(show, demonstrate, suggest), and bibliographic attribution (1990:149). The

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second move, ‘establish a niche’, involves opening up the existing knowledge

structure to weaknesses, either by claiming new factors that expose the old
model, or by enhancing the existing model in some way. The linguistic
characteristics of move 2 involve references to the negative effects of
previous methods with grammatical negatives or conjunctions of adversity
(However, few) and lexical negatives (fails to, is inconclusive) (1990:155).
Any weaker or marginal steps are characterised by pointers such as it is of
interest that, a key problem is (1990:156).
The third move ‘occupy the niche’ carries the topic on to occupy the gap
established in the first two The linguistic features of move 3 involve a lack of
reference to previous research, explicit metalinguistic references to the
research text (the present authors, in this paper) and prevalent use of the
present tense (1990:160). By stating the aims of the new research and
exploring methods, move 3 takes the rhetorical direction into the ‘present’
research with increasing explicitness (1990:141). It is noticeable that the
Introduction includes many topics that are reformulated in the rest of the
research article (especially methods and findings). Since this is also a typical
function of Abstracts and Discussion sections, the research article emerges
not as a linear text developing its argument from one point to the next, but as
a series of more or less detailed recapitulations, differentiated by a change in
rhetorical emphasis. We have seen in the previous section that the concept of
reconceptualisation and reformulation is a also key issue in the development
of terminology.

A number of other linguistic studies have been carried out on the research
article as a whole. Some work has been carried out on the distribution of
lexical items in research articles (Inman 1978, Love 1993). Most research on
IMRD sections has however concentrated on rhetorical move analysis or
theme-rheme patterns (Nwogu 1989, Nwogu and Bloor 1991). In a different
direction, Atkinson (1992) has traced the historical development of the
scientific paper and the evolution of the IMRD sections (the core sections of
the research article) from letters to editors in the Edinburgh Medical Journal.
Many studies have established that grammatical features (most often
verbal tense, voice, or modality) are associated with specific rhetorical
functions, such as statements about the use of the passive or authorial
comment. Gerbert (1970) for example, analysed 24 verbs in English technical
writing, and found that the present represents a limited set of meanings
(scientific laws, processes and repeated actions, definitions, descriptions,
observations and material properties). The perfect aspect is used to indicate
relevance to the research process. Oster (1981) found that non-finite verbs
tend to be used for attribution and definition as pre-modifiers (tumor-derived

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factors in...) or in non-finite clauses (lipid mobilization in supplying fatty

acids.). Sager et al. (1980:218) found that when non-finites are in end-of-
sentence position (typically a clause position reserved for new information),
they signal a result ( ...leaving all the gears exposed). Wingard (1981)
analyses verb usage in 15 medical texts, showing that up to 40% of verbs
occur in the passive, and that while the present indicative is the most frequent
verb form (28-40%), 64-78% of verb uses are non-finite (70-80% of which
are past participles modifying noun phrases). Hanania and Akhtar (1985)
obtain different results from 20 MSc theses showing a preponderant use of
the past tense in Methods sections (usually in conjunction with the passive).
Malcolm (1987) makes an important distinction between rhetorical
constraints on grammar and rhetorical choice. An authors’ use of the present
tense for generalisations, the past for specific experiments and the present
perfect for footnotes are all constraints and unmarked choices. On the other
hand, a number of marked choices are available for talking about the work of
others. Writers use the simple present or the past in describing previous
research as either specific or theoretical, and use the present or the present
perfect to distance themselves from previous research (1987:38-40). In
addition, Gunawardena (1989) discusses the multi-functionality of tenses
such as the ‘retrospective’ present and the ‘inclusive’ present. Tenses cannot
simply be seen in terms of deictic time reference but also in terms of
authorial evaluation of the information he or she is setting out.
The semantics of verbs and the use of modal verbs in ‘hedging’ have also
attracted a considerable amount of research. Thompson and Yiyun (1991) for
example classify reporting verbs in research articles, distinguishing between
author’s stance (where evaluation ranges from praising to negative) and
writer’s stance (where statements are accepted as fact or non-fact). I. A.
Williams (1996) analyses lexical verbs in a corpus of eight texts and
establishes differences in phraseology across two types of medical research
article. He found that in different rhetorical sections, reporting verbs are more
assertive in clinical texts while more tentative in empirical texts.
Interestingly, within the context of my previous discussion of ‘discourse
coherence’, he reflects on the differences of lexical choice in different
research specialisms:

[...] the differences in the communicative purpose and its textual realization
between medical research types has been much greater than previously
assumed [...] (I. A. Williams 1996:195).

In corpus linguistics, research articles have tended to be subsumed in

general categories of scientific text (including popularisation). Barnbrook
(1996) notes that sublanguages as such have not been analysed in great detail,
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largely because scientific texts are treated as whole units and placed together
in order to arrive at coverage of several fields (with the assumption that they
are all related by degree of specialism).
However, there has been much corpus analysis of research articles in the
fields of terminology (Thomas 1993, Pearson 1996) and there is a growing
amount of corpus-based discourse analysis. In a corpus analysis of eleven
texts on oceanography, Banks (1994b) analyses the distribution of the
passive, personal pronouns, modal verbs and lexical hedging (in verbs and
adverbs) across rhetorical sections. He finds that there are phraseological
differences between modals such as can and may and that a high proportion
(69%) of modalised mental process verbs are used in the passive (it is
believed that...). He also notes that the lexical hedging of verbs with adverbs
(probably, generally) is so widespread towards the latter part of articles
(Results and Discussion sections) that their effect is at times redundant.
Myers (1989) has argued that such hedging is obligatory when the author
expresses some imposition on the community (claims, denials, coining of
new terms, apologising for speculation). More recently, Varttala (1999) has
compared hedging devices in a 50 text corpus of popular science and
technical research articles. All of this evidence of ‘hedging’ suggests that a
conventional voice has become entrenched in science writing, a point that is
supported by work on collocations and phraseology.
Corpus analysis on lexical collocation in research articles has also been
undertaken, either taking a phraseological perspective or concentrating on
typical NP complements of verbs. Zambrano (1987) analyses the
phraseological patterns common to Abstracts and Discussion sections,
including phrases identifying general problems, concerns of the research
article (this article / paper / study etc. shows /suggests / investigates etc.),
findings (involving nominal comparatives with show) and implications
(involving a high degree of modality: the possibility that, the fact that).
Master (1991) finds that inanimate nouns (shuttle, particle) are more likely to
be the subjects of active verbs than passives, and such verbs are more likely
to be verbs of causal processes (cause, affect, prevent) than reporting verbs
(show, indicate, suggest) (a distinction echoed in the PSC - the research
article corpus, as described later). Other work concentrates on the clause
patterns associated with certain families of nouns (Dubois 1981, Francis and
Kramer-Dahl 1991).
A small number of studies address the use of grammatical items and
cohesive devices. Thyman (1981) proposes that the description of non-linear
(simultaneous) events in scientific writing has led to changes in the use of
specific cohesive devices, such as the classifying and defining function of
this. This is widely used in the process of reformulation, a point noted in the

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corpus study below. From a more phraseological perspective, Abraham

(1991) distinguishes between the use of because of, signalling given
information, and because (a signal of new information). Because of is the
preferred expression in scientific writing (41% of the occurrences) as
opposed to 6% in spoken discourse, suggesting that reformulation of given
data is an important function of scientific texts.
Biber, Conrad and Reppen (1998) carried out a cluster analysis of
grammatical features on a corpus of 20 different scientific research articles.
Using Biber’s (1993) concept of multidimensional analysis, Biber et al.
(1998:157) demonstrate that ecology articles have relatively more impersonal
features (conjuncts, agentless passives, past participle post-nominal clauses
and adverbial subordinators) and more narrative features (past tense verbs,
synthetic negation, present participle clauses) than a similar corpus of
research articles in history and a corpus of general fiction. When different
rhetorical sections in their corpus are analysed on the Impersonal / Non-
impersonal scale, they find perhaps suprisingly that Discussions are the most
impersonal, followed by Methods, Results and Introductions. Their
explanation (that Discussions frame other researchers’ work in the passive:
1998:168) is interesting, although multidimensional analysis places much
emphasis on features of science writing that are well-documented in the
literature (passive verbs, tense, past participles). There seems to be little
scope in their work for the analysis of less salient features such as hedging
(the use of modals) or to-clauses in science writing, as these are characterised
in their statistical analysis as typical of other registers. Nevertheless, this is
the first parallel analysis of a battery of linguistic features within the research
article genre. Biber et al.’s (1998) study underlines the fact that much work
on research articles as a whole has concentrated on the linguistic features of
verbs, the overwhelming majority dealing with tense and voice (the passive).
This is perhaps not surprising, in that tense and verb form are key elements in
signalling the attitudes of the author.
Many other aspects of scientific discourse have been carried out in the
context of specific rhetorical sections. A brief survey of each rhetorical
section is set out below.

3.1 Titles

Very few studies have concentrated on research article Titles in their own
right. Apart from observations of their highly condensed nominal style, little
is known about the relationship between the Title and the rest of the research
article. Generally speaking, Titles are seen as sources for keywords in the

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information sciences. For example, Diodato (1982) has studied the relative
frequency of Title words in 50 chemistry, history, mathematics and
philosophy papers. Her findings indicate that 70-80% of all Title words occur
in the Abstracts and the first paragraphs of articles. She finds that chemistry
papers are the only papers to have an increase in the amount of Title words
throughout the paper, with the largest increase in the final reference sections.
The implication is that Titles are a good indicator of subject-matter, but
Diodato has little to say about the role of the Title in staking out the research
article’s claims.
In a rare analysis of research article Titles as a subgenre, Jaime-Sisó
(1993) examines a corpus of 2 000 journal Titles from six fields of medicine
(all downloaded from the electronic indexing service MEDLINE). Jaime-Sisó
is particularly interested in grammatical change over time. She finds that
from 1980 to 1990 the number of Titles with active clauses (e.g. Dietary fish
oil delays puberty in female rats) rose from steadily 0% to 40%. She observes
that these Titles are used in dynamic areas of science (developmental
biology) and in high prestige journals with consistently high scores on the
impact factor scale (Williams 1996, see section 3 below for an explanation of
‘impact factors’). Jaime-Sisó also finds that the types of verbs involved in
these active-clauses (contribute to, is required for, contains) do not give
empirical facts or findings as such, but oblige the author to justify the novel
results elsewhere in the article. The Title effectively becomes a promissory
notice of results. The point here is that linguistic change reflects the changing
role of the Title in terms of its environment. Titles have to ‘compete’ for
readers’ attention, and the use of Titles to suggest (if not carry) significant
results corresponds to the growing use of graphic abstracts in chemistry and
in other fields. This also implies the increasing independence of the Title and
Abstract as ‘stand-alone’ text types, a concept introduced by Gläser (1991).
Jaime-Sisó is careful to note that the occurrence of active verbs has only
become prevalent in a restricted field: other fields have significantly not been
affected by the trend. These observations require more extensive comparative
work, but do provide an interesting picture of the Title as a key element in the
framing of scientific claims. Although Titles do not normally set out a
propositional argumentation as such (unless they contain a full clause, as
Jaime-Sisó has demonstrated), they clearly have a function in situating the
research article in a wider framework and one might assume that Titles vary
in ambition, from setting out very specific technical points to evoking or
questioning the general status quo.

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3.2 Abstracts

The Abstract is considered to be one of the most important sections in the

research article genre. The Abstract represents the main ideas of the text, and
is often seen as an independent text in its own right. Abstracts are routinely
reproduced without the main article in abstracting indexes. As a result, more
research on Abstracts has been undertaken than on other sections, largely in
the information sciences and in fields such as textlinguistics. Most linguistic
studies find that Abstracts are highly polished and condensed texts, with a
high frequency of relative clauses and nominal embedding which makes them
particularly difficult for non-specialists to read. Not surprisingly, Abstracts
are seen as prototypical scientific texts, a fact that may artificially obscure the
role of those sections of the research article which tend to be more accessible
(Introduction and Discussion sections).
Most work centres around the processes involved in summarisation, and
tends to concentrate on Abstracts produced by a third party (either
professional abstractors or students). Baker et al. (1980) have analysed the
role of professional abstractors at the Chemical Abstracting Service (CAS).
The abstracting business is said to be immense: CAS alone employs over 2
000 indexers (Metanomski: personal communication). The size of the
business is reflected in the number of guidelines designed for abstractors
(Weil et al. 1963, Borko and Chatman 1963, Cleveland and Cleveland 1983,
Cremmins 1982 and Memet 1986). Khurshid (1979), Polskaya (1986) and
Raya (1986) have all examined indexing abstracts from the viewpoint of
information science, usually examining the most successful strategies for
creating informative abstracts. Typical of this kind of study, Buxton and
Meadows (1978) set out the common points of information contained in
chemistry Abstracts. Rush et al. (1971), Pollock and Zamora (1975) and
Sharp (1989) also discuss the possibility of producing automatic abstracts.
Automatic abstracting has been influenced by Van Dijk and Kintsch’s (1993)
propositional textgrammar and de Beaugrande and Dressler’s (1981) studies
on summaries formed by the matching of textual patterns. Gopnik (1972) set
out an exhaustive textgrammar of technical Abstracts from this perspective.
She sets out propositional ‘macro-rules’ which resemble Swales’ (1990)
rhetorical moves and steps.
Much linguistic work on Abstracts concentrates on the quality of
summaries produced by students (Frank 1971, Fløttum 1985, Sherrard 1989).
Meyes (1990) find that non-expert summarisers delete the wrong information
and construct propositions on false premises because they lack background

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knowledge of a specialist field. Gibson (1992) and Drury (1991) have both
demonstrated that non-author Abstracts which are perceived to be successful
tend to have topical sentence themes as opposed to textual and interpersonal
themes. Drury (1991) finds that rather than simplifying texts, summarisers
tend to render themes more abstract and technical (1991:436). The successful
summariser also reduces the number of relational and embedded material
verbs from the original text, introducing more material processes at the rank
of clause (1991:447: i.e. from It is thought that the temperature rises to The
increased temperature...). This is mirrored by increasing lexical density and
use of grammatical metaphor in successful summaries (Drury 1991:448).
Similarly, Salager-Meyer (1990b) finds that unsuccessful Abstracts are
particularly difficult to read, partly because they omit important moves
(conclusions or purpose) or order them in unexpected ways (results before
purpose, conclusion before results) and partly because the ‘valuable
signposts’ of discourse signalling and cohesive devices are usually absent in
Abstracts (1990b:378).
There has also been much descriptive linguistic work on a typology of
Abstracts. Generally, two main forms are recognised. The informative
Abstract introduces the main ideas and explains the essential points of the
original article. The indicative Abstract on the other hand reformulates the
article, following the progression of the article as closely as possible.
Informative Abstracts in particular are said to use markedly different
expressions and terms than the original text (Cleveland and Cleveland
1983:4). Grätz (1985) claims that most Abstracts in the sciences follow the
rhetorical structure of the original text closely and serve as indicative
Abstracts. However, Gläser (1991) has argued that the Abstract is a separate
genre rather than a rhetorical section, and points to its condensed presentation
of content and lack of deictic reference or stylistic devices. Endres-
Niggemeyer (1985) suggests that authors do not follow journals’ instructions
on Abstract and IMRD sections in any case. She argues that the categories
suggested by journals do not cater for the needs of the reader, and that
authors tend to structure Abstracts and other sections according to their own
specific objectives. This is an interesting observation, suggesting that
rhetorical sections are less clear cut than Swales and others have assumed,
and that scientists impose their own rhetorical goals rather more freely than
might have expected. Endres-Niggemeyer proposes conceptual text types
situated around topical poles, such as the overview and model building
Abstract versus the practice oriented and theory-descriptive Abstract
(1985:45). These are the modes of discourse successfully adopted by authors
rather the kinds of text requested by journals.

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Descriptive studies of Abstracts have also compared the linguistic features

of different types of Abstracts, and a smaller number have compared the
Abstract with the rest of the text. Bernier (1985) and Craven (1965) have set
out the syntactic features of what they call the ‘terse literature’. Harris (1985)
examines authorial comment and stance in scientific Abstracts, and Sastri
(1968) analyses prepositions in chemical Abstracts. King (1976) sets out the
typical vocabulary profile of author Abstracts. Dronberger and Kronitz
(1975) and Reder and Anderson (1980) studied the readability of indexing-
abstracts as a function of vocabulary. In a rare piece of comparative work
Fidel (1986) analysed vocabulary differences between indexing-abstracts and
Discussion sections of the original article. In an similar comparative study,
Nwogu (1989) analysed cohesion, thematic progression and Swales’ system
of moves in 15 medical research articles, compared with their Abstracts and
popularised journalistic versions. He finds that Abstracts have two obligatory
moves (indicating consistent observations / stating research conclusions) and
seven optional moves (corresponding to Salager-Meyer’s moves of purpose
and methods: presenting background information / reviewing related
research / describing data-collection / describing experimental procedure /
highlighting overall research outcomes / explaining specific research
outcomes) (1989:171). Abstracts do not include the moves describing the
data-analysis procedure and indicating non-consistent outcomes (1989:161).
Nwogu also finds that Abstracts have a much lower density of sentences per
move (2.02) compared to research articles (4 sentences/move) which is
reflected in the complex clause structures and a greater sense of embedding
or ‘compaction’ in the Abstract (1989:180).
In a computer-based analysis of technical Abstracts, Kretzenbacher (1990)
examines a corpus of 20 Abstracts with their original academic research
articles in German (a total corpus of 88 000 words). He confirms the general
finding that Abstracts have a highly nominal style, with a significantly higher
noun-per-sentence ratio, more ‘verbal substantives’ in German (which are
usually marked by the equivalent of noun suffixes -ness, -ity etc. in English),
and more nominal compounds than the original article (1990:56-67). The
main articles are found to have a significantly higher range of finite verbs,
while Abstracts have relatively more passive forms. Interestingly, Abstracts
tended to use as many modal verbs as the main articles. Only 8 of the 20
articles were found to have more modal verbs than their Abstracts, a finding
that suggests an affinity between with Discussion sections, where results are
frequently summarises, reformulated and re-presented. Abstracts are found to
have a slightly lower word per sentence ratio than the main texts, (23.8 to
24.62) which is still high in comparison with other German genres (1990:86),
presumably because Abstracts make relatively more use of embedded clauses

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rather than longer clause complexes. Also, Kretzenbacher finds that Abstracts
tend to use nominal groups and finite verbs as attributive elements of clauses,
a typical construction in German (1990:101). Kretzenbacher also finds that
Abstracts have relatively more genitive attributes (part of the general nominal
style in German) and definite articles, while the main texts have relatively
more infinitives, anaphoric reference, and personal deictic reference.
In the first of a series of large corpus-based analyses of Abstracts, Salager-
Meyer (1992) analyses verb tense and voice usage and modality in 84
Abstracts (from 49 research papers, 21 reviews and 14 case reports). She
finds that the active past tense is the most frequent verb form (51% across all
types) and corresponds with the rhetorical moves of purpose, results,
methods and case presentation. The past passive is particularly prevalent in
the methods move, indicating that this is an obligatory form of expression. In
the purpose and conclusion moves on the other hand, Salager-Mayer finds
that the choice of tense is more open to rhetorical interpretation: the present
may be used to state basic truths, but also to emphasise that previous research
is relevant to the study. The present perfect also has a multiple function of
reference to past experiments, introducing a topic as well as distancing the
author from the findings (1992:106). The past tense is found to be much less
prevalent in moves of statement of the problem and data synthesis, where the
function of the past is to indicate the undeveloped nature of previous
findings. Finally, modality is also found to be move-related, with the most
frequent modal, may, indicating a high probability of claims in the
conclusion; can being associated with data synthesis, and should used in
preference to other modals in the recommendation move (1992:105). Such a
consistent use of verbs for rhetorical purposes (in tense or modal form)
further supports Swales’ observations about the controlled nature of scientific
discourse, but also suggests that tenses and verb forms imply a much more
sophisticated set of interpretations than was previously thought.

3.3 Introduction Sections

The Introduction section has been a privileged area of linguistic analysis

since the early work of Swales (1981a). Yet Introductions are sometimes seen
as redundant parts of the research article, since specialists claim that they
tend to skip them. Ironically, the interest in research article Introductions
therefore lies in the fact that they appear have a primarily rhetorical purpose,
often linked with the need to provide academic validity to the article as well
as a useful background for readers who are non-specialists (Kinay et al.
1983). For a variety of reasons, therefore, Introductions are seen as having a

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relatively freer style than other research article sections and are also
considered to provide the writer with a certain degree of stylistic freedom.
Apart from Swales’ (1990) analysis of Introductions set out above, West
(1980) has studied the use of that-nominals which are relatively more
frequent in the Introduction section as opposed to the other rhetorical
sections. Hanania and Akhtar (1985) found the present to be the usual tense
in the Introduction, associated with the functions of introducing background,
establishing assumptions and the purpose of the research. Gunawardena’s
(1989) analysis of 10 biology and biochemistry articles shows that the
present perfect is particularly prevalent in Introduction and Discussion
sections, where both sections relate shared experience as well as report past
research. In their analysis of 15 medical research articles, Nwogu and Bloor
(1991) found that Introduction and Discussion sections have overlapping
thematic structures (associated with explanation and argumentation) while
Methods and Results sections have relatively constantly changing theme
structures (associated with description). Finally, the similarity between
Introduction and Discussion sections has been often noted, especially in
terms of phraseology and use of modal verbs (Salager-Meyer 1992, Williams
1996, Gledhill 1996).

3.4 Methods and Results Sections

Methods and Results sections are the most inaccessible parts of the research
article to the non-specialist. However, for the expert reader these sections
usually constitute the first port of call, especially in the experimental
sciences. While few studies have concentrated on these sections in their own
right, a small number of comparative analyses have been carried out.
Generally speaking, Methods sections are found to be predictable and
repetitive, and generally set out procedures as well as detailed findings. It is
well known that Methods account for the vast majority of passive verbs,
especially in chemistry (Hania and Akhtar 1985). Ironically, findings are not
always fully set out in Results sections, which are generally limited to
reformulating the Methods and summarising quantitative observations and
statistics. Evaluation and interpretation are reserved instead for the
Discussion section. Practices vary considerably from one journal to the next,
and sometimes these sections are combined or accompanied by
supplementary sections known as ‘Materials and Methods’, ‘Experimental’
or ‘Results/Discussion’.
For Swales (1990), Methods sections constitute the core science of the
research article. In most cases, especially in structural chemistry, the

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Methods section is the linear version of the laboratory book, a listing of

procedural formulae with details of techniques, brand names involved,
temperatures, measures, amounts used, reaction speed, molecular size (mml,
mhz, mmo) and so on. Swales claims that these sections are ‘highly
abstracted reformulations of final outcomes in which an enormous amount is
taken for granted’ (1990:121). Swales points out that this seems to belie the
empirical ideal in which massive detail ensures the possibility of replication.
The Methods section carefully legitimises the rest of the article, and in
Swales’ view constitutes a rhetorical section just as much as any other. More
generally, the passive is commonly said to enable a distancing of
responsibility of actions from the actual protagonists, as we discuss later in
terms of grammatical metaphor (Sager et al. 1980:209, Swales 1990:120).
Few studies of Results are conducted without reference to other sections,
and according to Swales both Methods and Results sections are ‘mutually
inter-dependent’ (1990:121). The literature usually points to linguistic
similarities between both. Adams-Smith (1984) analyses authorial comment
(in terms of modality items such as possible, first person references, markers
of analogy such as like, similar) and finds that the distribution of these items
throughout IMRD sections decreases in the Methods and Results sections and
increases again in the Discussion section. She also finds that past and passive
verb forms follow this pattern, and her results on the distribution of the
passive in Methods / Experimental sections are echoed by Banks (1998).
West (1980) has also demonstrated that that-nominalisation is extremely rare
in Methods and Results sections, while relatively frequent in Introduction and
Discussion sections. This is corroborated by Brett (1994) in his analysis of
Results sections in geography research articles. Finally, Heslot (1982) and
Wingard (1981) have shown that the simple present tense is more frequent in
Introduction and Discussion sections, and the simple past tense more frequent
in Methods and Results sections. The other complex tenses (continuous /
progressive) are rare. According to most of these studies, Methods and
Results sections tend to be conceived as the most ‘scientific’ sections of the
research article, i.e. the most removed from general prose and other varieties.
However, Biber et al.’s (1998) observations of relatively high amounts of
Impersonal features in Discussion and Methods sections (with Discussions
scoring very highly on the Impersonal scale) serves as a warning not to take
single features as indicative of absolute similarity between two sections. It is
possible that superficial similarities (especially in verb form) do not
correspond to deeper differences in rhetorical structure: Results sections deal
with the same themes as Methods, but set them out in fundamentally different
ways. Some of these differences may become clearer in our discussion of
collocation in section III.

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3.5 Discussion Sections

There have been a number of studies of Discussion sections (McKinlay 1983,

Hopkins and Dudley-Evans 1988), largely from the point of view of
rhetorical structure. Some comparative studies have emphasised the
similarity of grammatical features with Introduction sections (Gnutzmann
and Oldenburg 1992). On the basis of a 20-text corpus, Dubois (1997)
examines a typology of clauses (establishing semantic categories such as
metatext, methodology, conclusion, comment), rhetorical move analysis and
hedging. She argues that the rhetorical functions of Discussion sections are
very different to Introductions, since the Discussions provide a detailed
synthesis of results and their evaluation as viable elements of a new model.
Swales (1990) suggested that Discussion sections are the mirror images of
Introduction sections, looking out from the research into the wider world.
Thus Introductions synthesise past research and evaluate old models inwards
towards the ‘core’ scientific activity (Methods-Results), while the Discussion
section does the reverse, returning the product of scientific research to the
discourse community. This does not explain why grammatical features are
shared, although as with Methods and Results sections, we have seen that
superficial similarities of single grammatical forms are not always indicative
of deeper rhetorical differences.

4. The Discourse Community

In the previous sections, I have set out an introduction to the theory of the
terminology and discourse of science. In this section I examine these theories
in the context of a cancer research laboratory. In the first part, I explain the
context of cancer research and set out a basic explanation of cancer with a
view to defining the discourse of cancer research itself. I then conduct a
survey of cancer researchers, designed in part to provide a context for the
corpus set out in sections III and IV. Given that many of my informants have
themselves contributed their texts to the corpus, any light they can shed on
the writing process and their use of research articles is relevant to this study.

[From this point, in order to differentiate their opinions, researchers are

referred to by their italicised initials (as listed in the preface). Research
papers have been given a code indicating which journal they come from (e.g.
TL, BMJ5, CAR1), with a number when there is more than one article from

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that journal. These correspond to the titles and bibliographic data listed in
Gledhill (1995b) and in Appendix 2].

4.1 The Discourse of Cancer Research

A major linguistic motivation for studying pharmaceutical and cancer

research is that these fields involve a high degree of abstract
pharmaceutical knowledge. The interaction between a knowledge structure
and the language in which it is couched is of particular interest to the
phraseologist. In this section therefore I attempt to establish the discourse of
cancer from the point of view of the scientists themselves. This is a one-sided
view of discourse, in that it is seen as engendered by scientists for scientists
(with no participation with patients, or public bodies, for example).
Cancer research is perhaps one of the best funded and most influential
research activities in medicine. The nature and reputation of the disease is
emotive and dramatic, and this is reflected in the large amount of charity fund
raising and publicity that is generated for medical research in this area. A
review of the Science Citation Index (SCI 1993) reveals that cancer research
is the most important single specialist topic in medicinal research. The SCI
lists journals in terms of their importance, largely measured by citations and
cross-citations in other periodicals. The SCI lists over 8000 journals, and
medicinal applications of biochemistry account for two thirds of the first 100
on the list. Of the first 600 journals on the SCI list, 18 (3%) have cancer
or oncology in their title. Other diseases on the other hand have on average
only one journal-specific title in this list (two for AIDS, one each for Arthritis
and Rheumatism, Heart disease, Leprosy, Schizophrenia, inter alia). Thus
medical science is one of the biggest areas of scientific research, and cancer
research in turn can be seen to be one of medicine’s most prominent
activities, at least according to the 1993 listing. Cancer research appears to be
an enormous research programme, and the amount of money invested in the
disease, at least in the West, reflects an increased awareness of the effects of
cancer on an aging population. As noted by Kevles (1995), in the same way
that space exploration was given an artificial boost in America in the 1950s
and 1960s, cancer was not a major area of medical research until it enjoyed
political backing during the 1970s in Nixon’s ‘War on Cancer’. Cancer is
therefore at the centre of global scientific activity, and the discourse of cancer
is very highly politicised.
Most cancer researchers agree that the problem with the public perception
of cancer is that it is not one but many diseases. Cancer research covers a
broad sweep of specialisms (drug synthesis, virology, biochemistry,

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population genetics, patient care etc.). Various research activities

(chemotherapy, metabolism studies, causal nutrition studies) contribute to
solutions leading to the ultimate medical goal: the cure for cancer.
Other researchers, by the journals they read and publish in, tend towards
the description of the problem (such as oncogenesis, cancer epidemiology
and virology) while others look at the side-effects and long-term issues
associated with the treatment of cancer (toxicology, palliative care). This
complexity poses an obvious problem for terminologists, and also explains
how difficult it is to consider the Pharmaceutical Sciences Department as a
clearly-defined discourse community. In Swales’ terms (1990:32), the
discourse community is fragmented and has differentiated goals. In
terminologists’ terms, cancer is a distributed concept, occupying a series of
relative positions rather than a central role in and of itself. From my survey of
the Pharmaceutical Sciences Department , two defining features of the
discourse community emerged:

1) Scientists situate themselves in a network of professional relationships.

The extent to which individual researchers associate themselves with
cancer research or chemistry is a complex issue. The chemists in my survey
explained their approach to the problem in terms of combating disease
with target drugs, growth inhibitors and antiviral agents, while the molecular
biologists talked in terms of finding new approaches to the disease by
understanding such processes as cell death, replication and differentiation.
Since cancer researchers often commission structural analyses from chemists,
the two research programmes can be seen to be systematically interrelated
and one might establish from the beginning a professional ’service’
relationship where the oncologists (working in vivo) require functional
and structural analyses of pharmaceutical substances from the chemists
(working in vitro).

2) Scientists situate their research in a rhetorical relationship to cancer.

The idea that there are some researchers ‘close to’ cancer research
with others at the periphery is only a partial picture. In the survey this
became an question of how the researchers justified themselves to an
outsider. In my survey, only five informants declared themselves
cancer researchers. It emerges therefore that a community of cancer
researchers can not be defined by institutional or social arrangements alone,
and that it necessary to refer to a notion of the scientific model of the disease
itself. In order to give an insight into how the core phraseology of cancer
research is formulated, I have set out below an introduction to the science
behind the disease. The text reveals the dialectic which exists in the wider
research community regarding the nature of cancer as a medical and scientific
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problem. The text is based on my discussions with expert informants (most

notably, MT) and on an influential recent introduction to the subject by
Thomas and Waxman (1995). The key terms which typically occur in the
corpus have also been italicised:

The science of cancer.

All cancers have in common a genetic virus. This is promulgated by a potentially

malignant part of a gene: the oncogene. The virus produces defects in the ways
cells are reproduced and developed according to their predetermined function in
the metabolism (the un-diseased process being termed differentiation). Cancer is
the physical effect (by proliferation or tumour growth) of a breakdown in this
genetic process (carcinogenesis) and in particular the overexpression of the
oncogene. The cause of malignancy in the oncogene can take place at any
place within the cell or in its immediate environment. This complexity accounts
for a wide variety of specialist research, going beyond the field of genetics and
involving the organic chemistry of compounds that come into contact with the
cell. For example, malignancy involves growth factors attaching themselves to
the surface of the cell, and also the activation of oncogenes in the cell nucleus
where ‘ras’ proteins are able to transform DNA within the nucleus.
Above the level of the cell, the causes of these changes become less
identifiable as the physiological system becomes more complex. For exemple,
genetic changes have been known to be caused in breast cancer by steroids and
peptide growth factors. These are complex chemical proteins such as kinases,
often described as a cloud of toxicity. There is however no consensus on the
molecular origin of malignancy (Thomas and Waxman 1995: 6). The only
generalisation appears to be that diet is by far the largest cause of growth factor
activity, followed by tobacco consumption, viral infection and environmental
influences (such as electronic radiation). Recently, debate over the causes of
cancer has been hampered by empirical problems. Although many human
tumours are known to be caused by DNA-related viruses (for example,
immunodeficiency virus is associated with AIDS-related tumours), most scientific
research has concentrated on simpler animal RNA viruses (1991:5).
Because of the uncertain nature of malignancy, pharmaceutical responses to
cancer are varied. Generally, intervention in the genetic processes is not regarded
as viable (1991:14), since genetic breakdown is activated by external factors.
Instead, it is the actual moment of activation and the consequent production of
cancerous genes (expression) that is the target of pharmaceutical cancer research.
There has generally been particular emphasis on the study of processes just on
the surface of the cell, where growth factors interact with a cell’s chemical
receptors. Other researchers are interested in the transfer of chemical information
achieved by chemical synthesis. Yet another group of researchers are interested
in the possible starvation of the tumor’s own metabolic system. By developing
compounds that can target cells and replace receptors or growth factors, a
receptor can be developed that destroys the incoming growth factor by inhibition
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(a tumor necrosis factor , for example destroys carcinogenic receptors). Given

that there are over 2 million receptors on one cell, there is considerable scope for
specialism in different types of inhibitors.

This is the everyday language of cancer research. By introducing the central

terminology of cancer in this way, it is possible to build up a knowledge
structure of the field. It is also of no surprise to find much of the basic
phraseology of this text within our text corpus, especially in Introductions
and explanatory sections of the research articles. Such an account explains
why seemingly innocuous semi-technical expressions such as activation,
expression, inhibition appear to be involved in much of the recurrent
phraseology in the corpus.
The knowledge structure of cancer appears to be oriented into two
semantic planes. Firstly, research can be situated as a spatial metaphor to the
parts of a cell the researcher is most concerned with, such as the molecular
processes within and surrounding the cell. Secondly, research can centre on
the description of the effects of the disease, or causality and chemical
intervention against the disease. Research can thus be entity-oriented (around
the object of the cell) or event-oriented (around the chemical processes and
wider effects of the disease). For example, many of researchers in the PSD
were concerned with inhibition at the surface of the cell, and this view of the
disease may not correspond exactly to other researchers in other departments
or institutes. As a consequence, our text corpus tends to cover a much
broader range of issues than are of current concern to the PSD researchers,
although it can also be seen to represent a reasonable range of research
questions that have been formulated about the disease in general.
Given the scope and the immense activity involved in cancer studies, it is
easy to see how scientists need to be very specialised in order to claim any
expertise or centrality in their own particular field. The Pharmaceutical
Sciences Department can therefore only represent one tiny fragment of a
larger research programme. In this context, it would be useful to discuss
the dynamics of the discourse of cancer research, and in particular the ways
individuals and groups of researchers gain attention and claim relevance in
such a vast discipline.

4.2 A Textography of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Department (PSD)

This section describes some of the problems encountered when one considers
the extent to which a corpus can be ‘based on’ a very specific discourse
community.

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The Language Studies Unit at Aston University, where I was based, is

situated conveniently near the Pharmaceutical Sciences Department. It was
this connection that led me to contact the PSD with an initial questionnaire
about how the scientists used language professionally. The fact that
researchers in the pharmaceutical sciences were easily accessible
and interested in the role of language in their work was a considerable
advantage in building the corpus. The researchers gave free access to written
research and publicity material, including departmental listings and press
cuttings. They were also happy to talk about their texts and their use of
language, and to see that their activities aroused interest in other parts of the
university. The ethos of the discourse community is, I believe, an important
methodological step in building very specialised text corpora. This has also
recently been a key feature of the approach advocated by Swales (1998), in
which a textography is based on dialogue and mutual exchange of ideas in
order to better understand the constraints on the production of texts and the
context of use of specific text types.
None of the PSD had time to undertake more than one formal
interview (usually lasting one hour); so I decided to survey as many
researchers as possible in order to get a broad view of research. The survey is
therefore very different to the very close longitudinal study of
the type undertaken by Myers (1990). Even though the fourteen people
interviewed included only a third of the academic staff in the PSD, the
research activities of the department can be considered to be reasonably
covered.
The main fields of expertise in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Department
involve medicinal applications of chemistry to a number of major diseases
(including rheumatism, AIDS and tuberculosis). However, the largest group
in the department is the Cancer Research Group, which maintains its own
identity. At the time my survey was carried out, the PSD had a large output
of research with a number of high profile breakthroughs in the press.
According to its promotional literature, the department is working towards
‘advances in the understanding of disease in the metabolism’ (the sum of all
the chemical reactions in the living cell and hence the organism) and
‘targeting of disease by the development of highly specialised synthetic
compounds’ (the artificial production of organically functional drugs).
This conceptual difference is represented in an institutional division between
departmental sections. In 1992 the size of these groups (not including
postdoctoral workers and technicians) was as follows:

Section I: Drug Development

(Pharmaceutical Sciences Institute: 13 academic staff, 6 in the survey).

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

Section II: Cancer Research, Toxicology and Microbiology.

(19 academic staff and 8 in the survey).

Section III: Pharmacology

(5 academic staff 1 in the survey).

This raises the potential distinction between the discourse community and a
community thrown together from the point of view of an institution (a
difficulty discussed in Swales 1998). Generally speaking, institutional
communities do not necessarily correspond to the notion of discourse
communities (defined by ‘what they talk about’ and social networking rather
than by socio-economic grouping). An extensive survey of 20 000 academics
by Boyer (1994) has suggested that many researchers in British universities
have a greater sense of identification with their discipline than with their
own institution. As we have seen above, simply because a researcher is
working on a ‘cure for cancer’ does not mean that he or she defines their own
specialism as ‘cancer research’. The survey reveals below that the research
goals of my informants were not fixed to cancer research per se and that
researchers did not always respond to the question ‘are you working on
cancer research?’.
For example, the structural chemists (SF, BF, JG) had recently won a
substantial grant from the Cancer Research Campaign - yet during the survey
they distanced themselves from cancer research per se. Such issues as
funding or research group membership is therefore not a clear guide to an
individual or group’s perception of community, at least as they present
themselves to outsiders. To complicate things further, one informant admitted
that there was an unofficial policy of understating involvement in cancer
research because of potential animal rights protests. In another example, the
pharmacist WF felt obliged to switch his research to DNA molecules from his
more original work on a specific inhibitor because of departmental policy.
Did WF feel he belonged to the community of ‘cancer researchers’? His
answer to this was not clear-cut. Such institutional matters of policy and
presentation presumably constitute an area of tension in the department, and
suggest that a corpus of texts on ‘cancer research’ is not a truly accurate
description of the kind of texts and genres that the scientists see as valid and
central to their professional work.
It might be possible to determine which texts to include in a specialised
corpus by referring to statistical measures of importance or centrality, such as
the impact factor. Such a measure would presumably separate the choice of
texts from the personal and subjective feelings of the researchers. As
mentioned above, the impact factor (IF) in the Science Citation Index is a
statistical measure of the number of references that have been made to a
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single research article or journal in a general sample of the literature

(sometimes many thousands of journals). It is significant that both individual
scientists and research journals are increasingly judged on their impact factor
scores. In a survey of IF scores, Williams (1996) found that these scores are
often taken into account when evaluating a person’s research activity and
departmental funding. The system is self-perpetuating in that journals which
score highly on the SCI league table consequently attract more research
article submissions and, in return, receive higher IF scores. This in turn
influences the need to produce persuasive and well edited research articles.
While I have used IFs to justify the inclusion of some papers in my corpus,
they are not necessarily as reliable and as objective as they seem. As reported
below, some researchers were sceptical about the accuracy and relative value
of citations as measure of successful research, and had alternative ways of
assigning importance and prestige to specific journals and research articles.
In an environment where pharmacists and others are competing for
research funding from cancer research organisations at the same time as
cancer researchers ‘proper’, the perceived relevance of a specialism must
have a consequential effect on a researcher’s place in the hierarchy of his or
her field. It is noticeable in the corpus that Abstracts and Introductions often
mention cancer research as relevant applications, even when the main focus
of the text is on a relatively distant topic, such as crystal structure in
inorganic chemistry. The issues of field-centrality and representativeness are
discussed later in section III (corpus design).

4.3 Details of the Survey

A questionnaire was prepared and interviews arranged with fourteen

researchers from the Pharmaceutical Sciences department. The aim was to
gather information on two main areas: the discourse community (4 questions)
and the use of texts in that community (6 questions).

Survey question 1). What is your title and position within the
Pharmaceutical Sciences department? The survey involves a wide range of
scientists: the chief academic administrator (PRL), three professors
(MT , WI and AG), two senior tutors (RL, KW), one senior lecturer (PL), five
lecturers (DP,WF, JG, SF YW) and three research fellows (DA, HM, RW).

Survey question 2). What is your specialism, the main field to which you
would say you belong?

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The symmetrical way the scientists fit into the department’s research groups
was not echoed by researchers’ opinions about their own specialism. All the
members of the Cancer Research Group described themselves first as
microbiologists, and stated that their general expertise was in cancer research
(MT, KW, YW metabolic effects of cancer, PL cellular properties of tumours
compared to other diseases, AG chemotherapy and cellular delivery of drugs).
Another three microbiologists were interested in cancer and how
its treatment affected their own discipline, citing expertise in enzymology
(PRL), cell differentiation (DP) and developmental biology (RL). On the
other hand, the pharmacists and chemists also cited cancer as the first of
many applications of the synthetic molecules they are designing. WF is an
expert on the synthetic production of organic compounds that are part of the
chain structure of DNA, as well as cyclic compounds that can
inhibit carcinogenic factors. SF, WI and RW are each interested in the link
between growth inhibition and a specific family of compounds (phosphates).
JG is concerned with the synthesis that takes place between medical
compounds and their target sites. DA is interested in the structural elaboration
of chemical chains, with long term medical applications.
The perceptions of researchers about each other also made this a complex
issue, RW describing the ‘pure chemist’ WF as a cancer researcher. As noted
above, these differing perceptions arise from the complexity of the problem,
and from the seeming impossibility, within the field, of conceiving of cancer
as a unitary entity or process.

Survey question 3) How would you describe your field of research in terms
of a) its aims?, b) its main concepts or objects of research?, c) its
methods?

This question specifically aimed at eliciting ‘the common purpose’, a central

concept of Swales’ (1990) definition of discourse community. The
microbiologists and pharmacists divided neatly into two groups on this. The
cancer researchers and microbiologists stated in general terms the desire for
‘better understanding’ of disease, involving the complex mechanisms of
biochemistry above and below the level of the cell. For example, YW stated
that the aim of chemotherapy is to find the most effective killer of tumour
cells at the same time as the most efficient targeting drug to avoid
further damage. Similarly PL and RL stated that the aim of their research
was to understand how intra-cellular mechanisms involving control genes
allow for cell targeting. The pharmacists had much more specific aims which
required complex justifications, involving a description of specific
phenomena rather than an understanding of the whole system. While

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they were keen to mention possible applications and diseases, their methods
differed more distinctly from their aims than those of the other research
groups.
The survey question suggests that informants state the aims
and methodology of the research discipline. However, it is hard to see how
these cannot also include claims of centrality and individual originality, and
this is how most respondents answered it. The phrasing of most of the
methods (items such as new, novel, development, accurately) and some of
the aims (WF, MT) emphasise at least some implicit claim of individual
originality within the context of an established research paradigm.

Survey question 4) How does your own specialism relate to those of your
colleagues inside and outside the university?

This raises the distinction between an institutional community versus a

wider discourse community (‘a discipline’) and attempts also to establish the
‘common mechanisms of interaction’ said to define the discourse community.
Generally speaking, the scientists constitute much more of a discourse
community within the institution than their equivalents would do in the social
sciences or the humanities (both areas where research is often perceived as
individual activity).
There were clear areas where researchers claimed they worked very
closely, and all of these were linked to the production of written genres. Most
importantly, all researchers were involved with joint publications (not
necessarily within the same research group). Much research in chemistry is
published in series (SF’s contribution to the corpus is ‘Part 7’ of his findings)
and any joint series of publications must contribute significantly to a sense of
long-term common purpose. Most researchers also co-operated on official
policy documents within the department which ultimately determined which
research group they were working in.
Outside the university, research appears to be conducted in loose
groupings, very often of an institutional nature (compare this with generative
or functionalist schools in linguistics, for example). AG noted that
researchers would be aware of related groups elsewhere which would
be regarded as ’soft competitors’ exchanging research papers and
communications, coordinating some grant proposals, at other times
competing for them. WA stated that for cancer research there were national
and international work groups that exchange results and negotiate areas of
specialism in order to avoid duplication. MT also noted that if exciting
laboratory results occurred, colleagues would telephone other research
centres to find out whether they had been replicated or could be explained. In

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pharmacy the degree of specialisation meant that the number of outside

groups would be extremely small, and WF suggested that there might be
around 10 people in the world who might be considered experts on his own
specialist compound. On the other hand, the cancer researchers associated
themselves with national charities i.e. with their own source of funding, while
the pharmacists looked to Germany and USA for related research groups in
universities and industrial sites, and recognised that these countries had a
large number of fields which were new and could offer them some kind of
exchange.

Survey question 5) What are the main sources of information for your
research?
Researchers in the sciences notoriously skim and scan their texts, often
using them indexically (as we see below). The range of sources is therefore
wider and more likely to be driven by indexes, both the basis of traditional
indexes or on computer. Text books appear to be given much less priority,
although they are obviously important for teaching (not a priority in the
PSD). Research articles, indexes and electronic indexes were cited as primary
information sources. Researchers were asked to select five journals of general
interest and five that they considered essential to their own field. They found
this rather difficult, presumably because of the sheer number of possible
responses. Among the journals researchers mentioned, Nature, the British
Medical Journal (BMJ), the Lancet and the International Journal of
Cancer (IJC) were mentioned by over five researchers. Science,
Pharmaceutica Acta Helvetica (PAH), the British Journal of Pharmacology
(BJP), Cancer Chemotherapy and Pharmacology (CCP), Cancer Research
(CR), Journal of the Chemistry Perkin Transactions (JCPT) and Journal of
the American Chemical Society (JOACS) were all mentioned more
than once.
Researchers also mentioned extensive use of the electronic Title and
Abstract databases MEDLINE, SCI, Index Medicus and ADONIS. Some
claimed that these were beginning to replace traditional ‘journal loyalties’
since a relevant title may be found in an index which covers hundreds of
journals, all from the researcher’s office. PRL suggested that regional and
specialised journals would flourish since their coverage could be made
more widely available through publication in indexes.

Survey question 6) In a given research journal, what criteria determine which

articles are of interest?
There are central research articles and peripheral ones, and researchers
clearly adopted different reading strategies once a decision of relevance had

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been taken. Nystrand’s dynamic reading model (1988) proposes that such
decisions are probabilistic, based on factors that are given different
weightings which change according to how far along the decision making
process the reader has gone. Researchers were asked to demonstrate with a
journal at hand which articles would attract their attention: JG proposed that
he read around ten papers per hour from as many journals.
Other researchers stated that they read from one morning a week to ‘every
spare moment’, in the library or on the train, and when they occasionally had
to check for specific information in the lab.
Key terms in Titles, as well as compounds in formulae, recognisable
diagrams and data formats are the first entry points and the first clues. The
respondents stated that specialist entities (a term I use later but first employed
by WF when talking of specific compounds, cell lines, diseases etc.) were the
main criteria, followed by or in combination with abstract properties or
processes (stability, expression, total synthesis). Both entities
and processes were inferable from titles, figures and reaction schemas, as
mentioned in the introduction. Neither had to be exactly in the researchers’
first list of major concepts. Another motivation for reading papers was
curiosity, to catch up with related fields, or according to PL ’keep up to date
general science I should know’. DP stated that a half-relevant term
would ’fish out a subset’ to provide a relevant connection. WI states certain
preliminary questions that the researcher brings to the journal:

1. What things does it deal with?

2. Has anyone done this before?
3. Are there surprising results?
4. Do I believe it or not?

According to WI these would then lead to specific parts of the research

article. In MT’s case, surprising results may be indicated by the number of
animals used in the study and other methodological details. PL suggested that
belief in the data was an important criterion: ’would the drug work with real
patients?’ AG stated that the main criterion for him was whether the paper
offered a new model or alternative methodologies, not just providing positive
or negative data. Several mentioned the Journal of the Chemical Society’s
instructions for authors (1993: xii), which gives detailed rules on what is to
be defined as ‘new’. Among other rules: a compound is new if it has not been
prepared before, if it has been prepared but was not adequately purified or
was purified but not adequately characterised. Thus novelty must be judged
in terms of claims against increasingly specific areas of other
scientists’ research.

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The criteria of relevance are presumably different in electronic indexes

where an initial stage of filtering precedes the processing of titles. DP gave
sample figures of the kinds of titles he gets from the electronic index
Medline. Of 300 titles from a 6 month period, he estimates that 150 will be
already known, 100 useless and perhaps 3 or 4 on his specific area. The
process of narrowing down in an automatic index (from the general key word
cancer for example to bacteriology, or cachexia) appears to be more
restrictive than reading entire titles in a journal where an entire proposition
(sometimes in the form of an active clause) must be processed. In the journal,
there is a chance that the title can be relevant (because of originality or
peculiarity) without mentioning any specific keywords. This problem has
been addressed by the SCI’s Permuterm index, (SCI 1993) which accepts
not only one word input but also entire phrases. Permuterm uses a
hierarchical structure of key words and their phraseological or terminological
synonyms (cancer, tumor growth, metastasis, oncology), followed by subject-
specific collocations (such as advanced, anorexia, associated, clinical). Some
semi-stop words (such as methods, analysis) are consulted only when key
terms are identified. As in Phillips’ (1985) study, high frequency words (full-
stop words) are eliminated from the search, while other interesting middle-
range terms are also eliminated (e.g. studies, consisting, shown). This
classification of words implies a redundancy of high frequency items in
indexing. However, the possibility of high frequency items being associated
with rhetorical and phraseological patterns in the corpus does not appear to
have been explored.

Survey question 7) What information do you derive from titles, abstracts, and
other sections of the research article?
This revealed perhaps some of the most interesting discussion with the
expert informants. Two reading patterns emerged: browsing and consulting.
While browsing involves skimming the text for relevant details, consulting
involves what I term the ‘indexical’ function: researchers use a number of
different entry-points (graphics, keywords, bibliographic references) to
approach the text. The text therefore becomes non-linear, and is structured
accordingly to allow for this. Most generally, indexical reading takes place in
the lab, when a straightforward fact is required from a text book or an index.
The fact that some technical research articles are used in this way constitutes
a major difference with research articles in the humanities, for example, and
implies radical differences in the way the text is organised. Most chemistry
texts for example establish temporary codes for relevant chemical
compounds which allow the researcher to look directly at diagrams and then
jump straight into the text. The information derived from different parts of

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the article therefore depends on the expectations and expertise of the

researchers and on the graphic properties of the text itself. It follows that not
one part of a chemistry text can assume that the reader has read the previous
sections, and much of my corpus is made up of repetitive, but linguistically
interesting recapitulations. It appears that the more experienced researchers
have more motivation to browse or read articles all the way through: MT
claimed that he always checked the entire article, PRL claimed that he
browsed ‘more than the youngsters’, while the (younger) pharmacists
claimed that they read only partially.
Discussing how he dealt with titles and abstracts in journals, DP said that
the decision to read on depended on whether the title was at the periphery or
close to his field and how much he could derive from the Abstract. If a title
or Abstract is on the periphery, DP looked up the rest of the paper only if
there was not enough evidence in the Abstract. If there was sufficient
evidence in the Abstract, he was content to take it at face value and to move
on elsewhere. If papers were closer to his field, DP would ‘glide through the
article’, focusing on the major findings if he couldn’t explain them from the
Abstract. Similarly, PRL claimed that familiarity with a field meant that the
amount of attention and reading time could be reduced in the rest
of the article: ‘if you are clever enough you can infer the whole article from
the abstract’. Thus partial reading is not indicative of irrelevance or lack of
effort but simply the researcher’s confidence in imposing a coherent reading
of the text. The kind of information researchers expected in Abstracts and
other sections closely resemble Swalesian moves. PRL claimed that an
Abstract had four main elements in relation to the main article:

1. Inform the reader what it is about,

2. Tell the reader what you do in the paper,
3. Say whether you’ve succeeded in doing that, and
4. (‘a bit of a luxury’) Give future possibilities.

The role of the Introduction in the reading process appears to be ambiguous.

Given the graphic nature of pharmaceutical research articles, their indexical
use, and the relatively basic nature of the information in the Introduction, this
section might appear to be redundant. Researchers spoke of the Introduction
in terms of formally proposing and justifying current research. Others said
that they expected to find the development of ideas presented elsewhere. DL
stated that the Discussion section was the most important section for the
reader, as it summarised the current research as well as suggesting or
predicting an extension to the research model.
The pharmaceutical scientists (SF, WF) confirm our discussion above
regarding the linguistic properties of Methods and Results sections. They
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claimed that there was an overlap between them, as Methods sections start
off as lab book transcriptions combining a template of measurements, while
the Results ‘re-ordered’ the measurements. This corresponds with an
unexpected symmetry in my corpus: all of the ‘Experimental’ sections
occurred in chemistry journals, and these often replaced Methods and Results
sections in these journals (especially in the shorter ‘communications’ papers).
Presumably the experimental data for the pharmacists can stand alone, while
the shape of the data and medical applications can be treated separately in the
Discussion section. In contrast, the microbiologists (PL, MT) saw Results
and Discussion sections as distinct from Methods. Indeed, in the corpus all
the joint Results/Discussion sections occur in microbiology and cancer
journals. PL stated that this was because experimental data are seen as an
‘extension to the research model’ (as AG implied above) and thus in
microbiology actual results should be interpreted and integrated in the
context of medical applications.
This implied distinction between applied biochemistry and theoretical
chemistry may be an oversimplification, but any distinction between these
two essentially different positions means that not all of the rhetorical sections
are equivalent, even if they have the same subtitle in different journals. As far
as the corpus is concerned, this forces us to down-play some of the
distinctions to be made between such sections as Methods / Results and
Discussion sections. In practical terms, I was also obliged to exclude a small
number of hybrid sections (most notably Results / Discussion sections) from
the main Wordlist comparison, since the two sections were completely
merged in some journals.

Survey question 8) At what levels do you write or otherwise contribute to the

field?
Naturally, the most experienced researchers contributed in numerous ways
(MT cites books, review articles such as the TPS article, book reviews, work
in progress papers, DP cites seminars, industrial reports, international
workshops), while everyone was involved with grant proposals, internal
project reports and research articles (considered to be at the same level of
prestige). This question was accompanied by a request to donate a published
research paper for use in the corpus. For a discussion of the different types of
research article obtained, see section III, 6.4, below.

Survey question 9) Details of writing up.

a) At what point of research does the writing of an article occur?

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MT suggested that cancer research publication was essentially ‘news

oriented’ - in the sense that as soon as a coherent story emerges from the data
then it is worth publishing. JG (whose chemical processes actually use the
metaphor ‘stories’ as a technical term) stated the same: writing up
occurs ’when a block of information constitutes a story’. This was also the
case not just for positive results but also for ‘half-positive results’, where
there is a significant contradiction or difficulty to relate to the discourse
community. As a chemist, JG writes data-oriented communications which, he
claims, take a day to write but over a month to edit and redraft
after discussions with colleagues. WF suggested that some writing up takes
place before experimentation. This is presumably enabled by the serialisation
of papers, and the template-like nature of experimental sections. Presumably
researchers judge their own ‘newsworthiness’ in much the same way as
they decide to read others’ research papers, by centrality to a perceived
problem, originality, and so on. Departmental factors must also play a part,
and these may include peer-expectations, contractual obligation and inter-
institutional competition for drug patents, which appear to be a particularly
fierce area of competition in the pharmaceutical sciences.

b) Who is responsible for writing up and for editing?

SF and WF stated that if a research article is jointly written in a team, as
are most of the papers in the corpus, different researchers take responsibility
for different sections, with the central sections (note the use of the term
‘central’) such as the Experimental or Methods sections being built up
by many individuals over time. This does not apply to the more experienced
researchers, who either publish alone or, as MT and AG admitted, arrange for
their research assistants to do the main writing up while they edit and
correct.

c) How is the writing related to the research activity, and where is it stored?
Research articles are not only read in non-linear fashion,
their production appears to be non-linear as well. Myers (1990) suggests that
a paper is built and redrafted by several writers from the ‘middle’ out towards
the Introduction and Discussion sections. Different members of the PSD
conferred that they record reaction details of syntheses and other
measurements over a period of months in the lab book with its various
sections:

1. -Title (of extreme importance to avoid confusion of data)

2. -Date (to avoid repetition and to measure stages of progress)
3. -Reaction name
4. -Structural formulae (materials involved listed in shorthand codes)
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5. -Reagents (catalysts and added materials for synthesis)

6. -Procedure
7. -Structural analysis of final product (in molecular percentages)
8. -Specific measurement details (yield, melting point, optical rotation,
refractive index, elemental analysis...)
9. -Purity (checking contamination)
10. -Proof of structure (by blot analysis, NMR spectroscopy etc.)

This template provides the shape of the Methods, Results and Experimental
sections. When transferred to the word processor, this list forms the backbone
of the research article that can be fleshed out by adding explanations of
unfamiliar procedures.

Survey question 10) What procedures exist to ensure the quality of research
writing?
This question attempted to raise issues of editing as well as peer-review.
All the researchers referred to the instructions for authors included in most
journals. The Journal of the Chemical Society (Perkin Transactions)
stipulates the format and the constitution of the research article, especially
concentrating on the Experimental section and on the organisation of material
(reaction schemes, the use of italics for position-defining prefixes, hyphens
for chemical bonds etc.) as well as setting out rules for the authentication
of novel compounds, this being the primary objective of the specialism.
Contributions are generally judged on criteria of:

1. Originality of scientific content and

2. Appropriateness of the length and quality to content of new science. (Perkin
Transactions, 1993: vii)

Echoing the kind of re-editing examined elicited by Myers (1990), the

researchers confirmed that research articles have to undergo on average three
or four re-writes before the final version is accepted. MT stated that editors
generally correct structural aspects of papers, tone down claims and question
the ‘generalisability’ of experimental data. Other researchers mentioned
problems style. MT, PRT AG and WF all stated that the majority of editing
deals with changes of emphasis and poor style, while PRL was also
concerned that corrections of his own style appeared to be arbitrary and go
‘unpunished’ in other publications. Although ‘grammar’ and ‘style’ are
mentioned by almost all the researchers as areas that consistently require
correction, they were hard pressed to cite actual examples. DP was aware
of standard procedures of politeness and for professional attack, including the
damning: it is rather surprising to find that x failed to find y followed by a

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proposed explanation, ‘if you’re feeling charitable’. PRL suggested that

several clichéd phrases should be avoided, such as typical results show that
and preliminary experiments were conducted. Several researchers claimed
that their main problem in editing remained ata basic grammatical level, and
there is some evidence that repeated structures are seen as poor style (PRL
explored the possibility of eliminating the passive, for example, and
replacing it with the imperative, as in cooking instructions!). Despite these
reservations, it seems however that this phraseology resembles some of the
most frequent and consistent expressions in the corpus. In addition, SF and
others were surprised by my questions on repetition in articles. While they
are aware of general stylistic constraints and general rhetorical functions, the
researchers were often unaware of the role of reformulation and paraphrase in
their texts. I asked WF and SF to talk through their papers in terms of the
main message in each section, and they agreed that an important function of
the various sections was not only to demonstrate methods and evaluate
findings, but also to reword and re-explore concepts that had already been
introduced elsewhere in the article.

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III. Collocations and the Corpus.

In the first part of this book, I have demonstrated some of the complexities of
the terminology and discourse of cancer research. In this section, I set out the
theoretical and technical notions of phraseology and collocation on the basis
of Firth’s theory of meaning. This prepares the way for an analysis of
collocations in research articles in section IV. As collocational analysis
requires large amounts of authentic textual data, the final sections of this
section set out the design features of a representative corpus of cancer
research articles: the Pharmaceutical Science Corpus (PSC).

1. Choice in the Grammar of Texts.

It is relatively straightforward to describe the linguistic features of scientific

texts. The computer enables us to identify large numbers of regular
expressions, and a well-designed corpus analysis should be able to
automatically recognise given linguistic features as the typical style of a
specific genre or type of text. The main issue however is not our ability to
spot long-term patterns, but the extent to which we are able to identify
relationships between these expressions and their relative value when used in
a real text and by a real scientist. And although Chomskyan and generative
theories of language have proven to be valuable models of potential
expression, mainstream linguistics does not provide us with the conceptual
apparatus necessary for a description of style within a particular discourse. I
propose here that the analysis of collocation presents an ideal opportunity for
such discourse analysis. However, it is important to be able to situate isolated
examples of collocation within a broader system and to explain their
significance within the discourse of science. What is needed therefore is a
linguistic account of choice of expression, and it is for this reason that many
descriptive studies refer to Firth’s ideas on language. As Firth was also the
first linguist to place the term ‘collocation’ within a theory of meaning, an
overview of his theories of language, and their development in Halliday and
Sinclair’s work are central to a theory of collocation in general.

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Apart from the concept of collocation, as noted in the overview (section

I.3), the main contribution of Firth has been to argue that there are many
levels of meaning:

....the complete meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of

meaning apart from a complete context can be taken seriously. (Firth
1935:37).

Here ‘context’ refers to textual context (co-text) in the first instance, but also
to semantic knowledge and Malinowski’s ‘context of situation’. The point is
argued in similar terms by Wittgenstein, who not only conflates meaning
with use, but also links our understanding of an instance with our knowledge
of the whole system:

The meaning of a word is its use in the language...To understand a sentence

means to understand a language. To understand a language means to
understand a technique. (Wittgenstein, 1957, ¶199)

Firth’s ‘polysystemic’ principle is therefore based on the structuralist idea

that ‘if a new term is added to the system this changes the meaning of all the
others’ (Halliday’s reformulation: 1961:247). Firth suggested, for example,
that the meaning of the nominative case in a two case language would be
qualitatively different to its meaning in a four-case system (1957:190,227).
Although the linguistic form of the nominative is the same in both systems,
its underlying meaning is altered. The same is presumably also true between
varieties of the same language. Because the distribution of grammatical
resources varies from one variety to the next, the underlying meaning of a
given grammatical feature changes according to the system it is currently
engaged in. By primarily defining linguistic terms as functions, Firth thus
appeared to undermine the usual practice of linguistics which was to see form
as the primary basis of definition.
In the case of science writing, we have seen that the underlying meaning
of the passive, of forms of nominalisation and the use of modal verbs is
extended and modified by their use in the specialist language, and that these
uses (and therefore meanings) are often at one remove from their equivalents
in other varieties of English. Both Halliday and others (for example, Banks
1997), explain many of these functions in terms of abstraction, hedging and
grammatical metaphor (discussed below). These function-labels cut across
the boundaries of form. And as we have seen in section II.3, Firth’s
polysystemic principle underpins Swales’ concept of ‘discourse coherence’.
This perspective leads us to distrust the notion of sublanguage and other
characterisations of texts which rely on single grammatical features, or
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ascribe to a single feature a functional role which remains constant across a

series of genres or registers (as in Biber’s 1986 multifactorial technique).
A problem with all functional grammars lies in the extent to which it is
possible to map discourse functions to language forms. Halliday approaches
this problem from Firth’s perspective of ‘modes of meaning’. Halliday
(1985) suggests that choices of expression are not isolated and simple but
involve simultaneous decisions involving three basic metafunctions. The
notion of metafunction emerged from Halliday’s work on intonation and
variable emphasis of mood and theme in spoken English. Halliday noted that
intonation in the spoken language is used to great effect in English, and
allows the same sentence to be modified according to its propositional
meaning, thematic focus and rhetorical force (Halliday uses the terms
ideational, textual, interpersonal). The written language clearly requires
these functions as well, but must express its ‘intonation’ with different
resources: for example, by a more complex form of syntax (hypotaxis,
embedding) or by signalling emphasis graphically (by capitals, exclamation
marks, italics, paragraphing, punctuation etc.).
Halliday proposes that language varieties realise the three metafunctions
in different ways. This can be demonstrated using a single example from the
discourse of science:

1. This protein is thought to be a major factor in breast cancer.

The ideational function corresponds to the traditional view of transitivity as

an expression of participant, process and circumstance (Halliday and Hasan
1989:68). In the example sentence, the subject of the verb this protein is a
‘participant’ but is not felt to be the agent or initiator of some action - the
usual function of the grammatical subject. Instead, this protein represents a
‘token’ which is attributed a value expressed in rest of the clause (a major
factor in breast cancer). Ideation is therefore a purely semantic relation
within the clause.
The textual function takes a different perspective, and involves the way
the message is presented in the surrounding discourse. For example, science
tends to organise its messages by constant reformulation. In the sentence
above, this is used to encapsulate and refocus a previous discourse topic (a
protein – a backwards reference to a complex chemical compound). This is a
lexical reformulation and tends to involve a more general word or a new
formulation with some degree of evaluation (This unusual orientation
indicates that ..., This surprising result prompted us to ...). Thus while the
ideational function emphasises grammatical roles within the message, the
textual function relates the message to the running text. The textual function
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is typically seen in the use of the passive. From a thematic point of view, the
passive effectively ‘saves’ new information in the message until the end of
the sentence. Although this is seen as a prototypical feature of science
writing, the same process occurs in other genres, especially news reporting
(McCarthy and Carter 1994).
Finally, the interpersonal metafunction involves the clause as a rhetorical
proposal which can be subjectively asserted or qualified. In science writing,
the interpersonal function is realised by various impersonal devices which
effectively obscure the direct involvement of the scientists or express some
degree of ‘polite’ hesitation in order not to overstate the claims of the author,
as pointed out by Myers (1989). Modality in science involves inanimate
subjects (results suggest that), the hedging of data using modals (it may be
the case that), the use of mental or verbal process nouns (projecting nouns
such as belief, suggestion) and, as might be expected, the generalised use of
the passive (cell growth was analysed). In the above example, the sentence
can be seen to have the same propositional meaning as This protein is a
major factor in breast cancer, but incorporates a further degree of modality
in the form of a mental process verb (thought). This is further modalised by a
passive (is thought to be) in contrast to a more direct alternative ‘we believe
this protein to be a major factor...’.
Thus from Halliday’s point of view, a specific grammatical form can be
treated to different kinds of interpretation within the same overall framework.
The passive emerges as a simultaneous collaboration of three different
choices: a way of placing the agent or medium (an ideational function) in the
‘new’ position of the clause (a textual function) at the same time as avoiding
the expression of personal involvement (an interpersonal function). Although
the metafunctions are often discussed in terms of clauses, they are not tied to
grammar alone and have provided a framework for lexical studies of idiom
(Fernando 1996) and the analysis of scientific texts (Wikberg 1990,
Mauranen 1993).
The concept of value-related choice is at the heart of Halliday’s systemic
grammar. As Halliday puts it:

The system of available options is the ‘grammar’ of the language, and the
speaker, or writer, selects within this system: not in vacuo but within the
context of speech situations. Speech acts thus involve the creative and
repetitive exercise of options in social and personal situations and settings.
(Halliday 1976:142)

The term ‘systemic’ therefore indicates choice within a system. The concept
of choice does not imply free expression with infinite possibilities, but
instead indicates a continuous spectrum from a typical to a more marked
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expression. Halliday (1991,1992) therefore proposes that choices in

functional grammar operate on a probabilistic basis. He suggests that closed
systems in language oscillate between equiprobable systems (past vs. non-
past tense, singular vs. plural) and systems which are skewed (affirmative vs.
negative polarity in the clause, passive or active voice). Equal probabilities in
the system are likely to indicate a largely redundant choice, whereas skewed
probabilities assign a high level of emphasis on the infrequent or marked
choice.
In a pilot study designed to demonstrate this hypothesis, Halliday and
James (1993) examined 25 high frequency verbs in an early version of the
Cobuild corpus (20 million words). They found that clause polarity is
distributed at a ratio of roughly 90% / 10% while the primary tenses are
distributed roughly equally (50% / 50%). These probabilities are then
assumed to vary according to variety of language. In science texts, Barber
(1962) observed that of 1770 verbs observed in astronomy, biochemistry and
electronics, 89% are in the simple present and 11% in other tenses. The past
tense is therefore marked in scientific articles, but in the language as a whole
(where it is equiprobable) it represents an unmarked choice. Barber also
found that the active / passive voice was slightly less skewed than normal at
65% / 35% and thus represents a less marked choice. In Halliday’s model of
register therefore, words and grammatical constructions have an inherent
probability attached to a specific discourse or register. As Halliday says:
‘frequency in the corpus is the instantiation ... of probability in the grammar.’
(1992:66). Such a system of probability in the grammar has important
implications for the interpretation of statistical results in the corpus, as
Sinclair notes (1993c:167).
Nevertheless, these probabilities are not fixed properties of specific
varieties: we still have to account for Swales’ ‘discourse coherence’, and the
possible recasting of stable grammatical features into new roles. When
Halliday refers to the register of science, his definition avoids explicit
reference to grammatical form as a constant feature, and he instead prioritises
the favoured status of certain forms from the point of view of the system as a
whole:

[Science writing] is English with special probabilities attached; a form of

English in which certain words, and more significantly, certain grammatical
constructions, stand out as more highly favoured, while others
correspondingly recede and become less highly favoured than in other
varieties of English. (Halliday 1993:4)

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This view is not far removed from Enkvist, who provided a definition of style
that is tailor-made for corpus linguists, being statistical in nature as well as
incorporating the idea of register change:

The style of a text is a function of the aggregate of the ratios between the
frequencies of its phonological, grammatical and lexical items, and the
frequencies of the corresponding items in a contextually related norm... past
contextual frequencies change into present contextual probabilities, against
whose aggregate the text is matched. (Enkvist 1964:28)

It is perhaps useful then to conceive of a register as a variety of language in

which all the resources of language are still available but are marked for use
as ‘central’ or ‘peripheral’. This notion is perhaps more flexible than that of
the ‘sublanguage’ (see Chapter One), which does not distinguish between the
core or peripheral features but situates the sublanguage as a whole in relation
to other sublanguages.
In support of the Hallidayan perspective, many studies have shown that
the grammatical features of registers are historically contingent and open to
free variation (Atkinson 1992). There is no such thing therefore as a
prototypical language of science or a fixed set of grammatical features, but
instead a series of Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblances’, features which
come into focus or fade away as the register moves in time. Registers are thus
inclusive of the whole language system, and any linguistic resource, no
matter how marginal, may undergo a revival within a specific discourse.
Halliday and Martin expand on this idea in their discussion of the historical
development of science writing. They claim that as a society changes its
system of self-expression, existing linguistic resources take on new roles
(1993:9). Halliday points to the fact that whenever there has been major
social, political, or technological upheaval, there have been shifts in the use
of language. Thus nominal expressions were introduced in medieval Latin to
deal with the philosophical and administrative tasks of the new written
language. The renaissance and the industrial revolution were in turn
landmarks for linguistic change in the major languages of science,
particularly French (Lodge 1996).
Halliday and Martin show that the same processes are still evolving in
technical and scientific English, in particular in the role of nominals. Martin
(1991) points out that an important function of compound nominals (for
example, cancer patient, cell growth) is to state a specific argumentation as
‘given’ or ‘understood’. For example, the grammatical relations between
‘cancer’ and ‘patient’, and between ‘cell’ and ‘growth’ are not expressed. It is
only in an extended grammatical paraphrase or reformulation that the
relations become more salient (patients with / suffering from cancer, growth
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from the cell / the cell as it is grown). Halliday has shown that scientific texts
systematically construct compound nominals by building the nominal up
piece by piece until several explicit grammatical relations are finally hidden.
The following example demonstrates how compound nominals are typically
formed within in a single text (Halliday 1992:70-71):

How glass cracks ... The stress needed to crack As a crack grows ...
glass ...
The crack has advanced ... will make slow cracks The rate at which cracks
grow grow ...
The rate of crack We can decrease the Glass fracture growth
growth ... crack growth rate ... rate ...

Although nominalisation of this type allows information to be reformulated

with greater flexibility within the clause, the underlying propositions in the
compound become increasingly difficult to interpret or de-construct. Once
formed, compounds may tend to become idiomatic and to some extent
beyond interpretation on the basis of individual elements. While the lay
reader may be able to guess the meaning of a nominal such as glass fracture
growth rate, it would be impossible to meaningfully explain the term and the
relations between each element without reference to the original text. In other
words, as Halliday states, the meaning of the compound is ‘instantial’,
couched in the text itself. This corresponds to the creation of new terms and
collocations – and we can see in this example a clear case of collocation and
terminology being created as a natural product of a text. Halliday terms this
‘logogenesis’ (1992:70) and it seems that few works on terminology, with the
exception of Pavel (1993a), have emphasised the primarily textual creation of
terminology.
As I have noted above, the terminology of science is often seen as
rationally planned by groups of experts rather than emerging from a single
text. Halliday and Pavel have shown however that texts are instrumental in
terminological innovation. In addition, the compound nominal pattern has
been recognised for some time as an important feature of scientific English.
Such is the pervasive nature of English phraseology that languages which do
not normally favour the juxtaposition of nominal elements without a
preposition or other relational marker (including French and other Latinate
languages) are beginning to adopt this pattern from English, most usually in
their technical and scientific terminology (Bauer 1979). Similarly, Stubbs
(1996) has pointed out a parallel evolution in English verbs, namely the
increasingly ergative use of verbs such as ‘the bank closed’ and ‘the factory
shut down’. Stubbs claims that the ergative function is symptomatic of a
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general discourse in English which obscures the nature of agency. His

conclusion is that ideology is implicit in linguistic choice, to the extent that
the selection of even one feature from a set of alternatives is indicative of
some rhetorical intent. We should note that it is only since the advent of
large-scale corpus analysis that such grammatical tendencies have been open
to systematic examination.
Halliday sees ‘ergative verbs’ and nominalisation as instances of a more
general process in scientific discourse: grammatical metaphor.
Traditionally ‘metaphor’ is associated with a lexical transfer or allusion.
Grammatical metaphor consists instead of the transfer of information from
one grammatical role to another. Halliday uses the following example: ‘the
fifth day saw them arrive at the summit’ as opposed to ‘they arrived at the
summit on the fifth day’. In the first example, the fifth day becomes the
grammatical subject but functions semantically as a metaphorical observer.
Several linguists have observed the effects of grammatical metaphor in
science writing. Banks (1994b) examines the use of research-oriented verbs
with inanimate subjects, as in The current meter at mid-depth [...] provided
data... [This] photographic technique will produce underestimates of
abundance. Banks compares these marked expressions with the general
language where inanimate subjects are the privileged subjects of events
(Water flows rather than a marked event: Geoff flows...). He concludes that
grammatical metaphor is a major linguistic resource for obscuring agency
and authorial responsibility in scientific writing.
From these observations, we can conclude that the traditional
preoccupation with the passive, the quintessential feature of impersonal style
in scientific writing, has to some extent obscured other fundamental features
of language which are equally central to scientific thinking. Ergative
expression of verbs and nominal reformulation are both realisations of a
common function in science, the ‘impersonal style’ identified by Biber et al.
(1998). But they also have a fundamental role in the textual expression of
ideas, a point that is difficult to identify from a statistical word-count.
Although the passive is an easily identifiable feature of written science, it is
clearly only part of a wider system and we need to bear this in mind in our
analysis of the corpus.

I have mentioned at several points that reformulation is a key process in the

development of scientific ideas. While collocations have not usually been
analysed in terms of their role in the text, a number of studies have argued
that lexical items and the lexical system as a whole may have an important
role to play in our understanding of text and text structure. Halliday and
Hasan’s model of cohesion, defines text as a series of explicit relations that

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distinguish it from a random string of sentences (1976:6-7). The essence of

the cohesion model is that grammatical reformulations (such as elision,
substitution and pronomial reference) as well as lexical items are seen to have
a role to play outside the traditional syntactic boundaries of the sentence:
either by signalling links outside the text (exophora) or backwards and
forwards beyond the level of the sentence (endophora). Lexical cohesion
involves reiteration and reformulation of items throughout the text, the use of
synonyms or superordinate words and a broad form of collocation
(1976:278). (Halliday and Hasan’s collocations are items which ‘share the
same lexical environment’ such as doctor and clinic, i.e. a paradigmatic
relationship as well as a syntagmatic one 1976:286). Thus grammatical
reformulation and lexical items not only have syntactic relations within the
sentence, they also represent choices that are cohesive in nature and serve to
signal relations within the wider development of a text.
On the basis of Winter’s (1977) work on lexical signalling, Hoey (1983)
analysed the distribution of lexical cohesion in text. He found that lexical
cohesion was of wider importance in the text and of greater complexity than
the other more traditional categories of cohesion, such as conjunction. He
argued that the role of lexis was crucial in textual organisation, so much so
that almost every lexical choice in the text could be seen as an
‘encapsulation’ or ‘prospection’ of ideas in the surrounding co-text (terms
proposed by Sinclair 1981, 1993b). Words are therefore not simply selected
as collocations or syntactic constituents in the clause, they are constrained
and interpreted within the running text. This observation clearly contradicts
the traditional view of writing, which sees ‘discourse markers’ as the main
elements in the organisation of the text (Hoey 1983:176). Hoey proposed
instead a ‘non-linear’ view of discourse. While signalling of all types clearly
aids the explicit formation of a coherent text, Hoey argued against the
traditional view that texts are set out in an implicit dialogue between writer
and interpreter, and instead predicts that discourse is built up of incomplete
and unfinished texts (1983:177):

We are all contributing to one interwoven discourse, of which our own

contributions are but incomplete fragments. (1991a:159)

This militates against the view of a text as a unit where every semantic
signifier and signal plays an equal and necessary role. Hoey’s conclusion is
that texts may make use of fixed expressions in order to allow the reader to
predict content and argumentation (1991a:154). He points to cloze testing
where informants successfully fill in lexical gaps and reconstruct coherent
text (he calls this the Jabberwocky principle, since the only clues lie
effectively in identifying the typical members of meaningful grammatical
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frameworks). This may also explain the observations I set out in the survey,
which suggest that researchers read ‘indexically’; that is, they are able to
successfully predict and by-pass much of the linear detail of the research
articles they have to process. As an extended reformulation, the research
article need not be read from beginning to end for all purposes. Lundquist
(1989, 1992) appears to provide evidence for this by showing that non-
experts who read scientific texts tend to rely heavily on lexical networks to
establish long-range links, while experts do not need explicit signalling and
are thus able to skip and skim through the text and establish a meaningful but
partial reading of the text (1989:141).
However, Myers (1991) has argued cohesive systems are in fact specific to
different registers, and take on different functions in the research article
genre. In his analysis of cohesion in science writing, Myers (1991:13) points
out that a reliance on lexical networks is not enough for non-expert readers.
Myers underlines the difficulty involved in deciding how cohesive lexical
repetitions really are, especially in terms of synonyms (DNA vs. genome) and
superordinates (molecule vs. product of transcription). He argues (1991:5)
that background knowledge of the scientific paradigm is essential for any
networks to be built up, and this accounts for the differing forms of cohesive
devices used in scientific and popularised texts. As with Hoey, he suggests
that phraseology may be the key to understanding cohesive relations:

Some cohesive devices depend on the reader recognising collocations, and

using them to unpack dominance relations in noun phrases. (Myers:1991:14)

This observation brings us back to Halliday’s work on grammatical metaphor

and the reasons why scientific texts are written in such a specific style. It
emerges from our discussion above that scientific research articles are not
only a series of arguments linked by progressive reformulation, they are also
non-linear indexes, allowing scientists to approach the text from several
entry-points and to use fixed expressions and lexical cues to orient their way
around the text. From a traditional perspective, these very specific properties
of science writing might be considered irrelevant to the stylistics and syntax
of the text, but in a Hallidayan grammar they are considered to be
determining features in the lexico-grammar and phraseology of the genre.
As with many aspects of Halliday’s writings, our discussion has led us to
an examination of specific examples and then on to a proliferation of more
theories. As de Beaugrande has pointed out, Halliday makes no attempt to
reduce grammar to a uniform minimal structure, but instead ‘[his] grammar
enables an analysis in which richness and multiplicity steadily
increase’(1991: 258). I have set out here some of the theory that has been
inspired by the work of Halliday’s work on choice in text. This leads us now
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to discuss Halliday’s notion of lexico-grammar and then move on to

Sinclair’s related notion of the idiom principle.

2. The Lexico-grammar

In the Introduction, I set out some of the theoretical issues surrounding the
notion of collocation, and suggested that collocations can be analysed in
terms of three increasingly complex standpoints: statistical / textual,
semantic / syntactic and discoursal / rhetorical. I argued that these three
perspectives are compatible and bring considerable value to the notion of
collocation. The statistical / textual approach insists on collocation as a
product of on-going discourse and seeks data which is unconstrained by
theory and categories which may be ‘self-selecting’. The semantic / syntactic
approach on the other hand demonstrates the need to restrict the analysis of
collocation to meaningful expressions and the need to establish the internal
cohesive properties of each phrase. Finally, the ‘discoursal / rhetorical’
perspective underlines the textual function of collocation as well as the idea
that collocations operate in a system of alternative choices of expression. It is
not surprising that the three approaches lend themselves naturally to a three-
stage methodology (data analysis, data selection, interpretation), and I
attempt to set this out my corpus methodology, below.

While I demonstrated that there are several ways of identifying collocation,

they still remain abstractions and far removed from actual processes of data
collection and analysis. Here I argue for a particular focus, the analysis of
grammatical items in the corpus. This is based on the belief that an untagged
corpus needs to be analysed in a systematic way. In addition, some research,
especially Sinclair (1991) indicates that grammatical items can provide a
useful way of initially approaching a large mass of data. Grammatical items
appear to be excellent indicators of general phraseology, yet they have not
received as much attention in general lexicology or corpus linguistics as their
lexical counterparts.
The irony about grammatical items is that although they happen to be
extremely frequent - and therefore from a Hallidayan perspective, extremely
important – they also happen to be too frequent. So much so that they are
usually systematically eliminated from statistical counts, especially in large
scale textual analyses, where the researchers are forced to concentrate on
lexical collocation (Phillips 1985, Smadja 1993). Workers in information
retrieval and automatic abstracting term them ‘stop words’ and happily
describe how they are able to automatically extract them from an index or

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data base (Luhn 1968, Yang 1986, Källgren 1988a and 1998b, Wilbur and
Sirotkin 1992). Previous studies have claimed that high frequency items are
stable in use and meaning across different types of language, and the reverse
assumption is that if a word is stable it is a ‘grammatical item’ or a ‘function
word’. Sager et al. (1980:238), for example associate a descending type /
token ratio (a measure of the density of different word forms) with increasing
levels of specialism in technical texts, that is: the most frequent words in the
language account for proportionally less of the total vocabulary of LSP texts.
They assume from this that high frequency words are of little use in the
analysis of specialist texts. Phillips also characterises grammatical items as
noise, distinguishing them from ‘carriers of local meaning in text’ (1985:66).
There are obvious justifications for this in an automatic analysis of semantic
structure in text. The assumption of redundancy has also been applied to
high-frequency items, even in collocational studies such as the BBI dictionary
(Benson et al. 1986) which eliminates common words (such as big, cause and
make). And the influential lexicologists Thoiron and Béjoint have stated that
high frequency words can collocate with ‘almost any words in the language’
(1992:7).
Yet if we are to adopt a systemic approach to discourse, it is important to
see grammatical items as fully part of the lexical system as a whole. While
Halliday proposes a theory of grammar and Sinclair works on lexis, both
view lexis as the bedrock of grammar and both see grammar and lexis in
terms of a continuum rather than a categorical divide. Halliday in fact terms
the complete grammatical system a ‘lexico-grammar’, where grammar is a
heavily constrained and abstract form of vocabulary rather than a separate
linguistic level:

Grammar and vocabulary are not two different things; they are the same
thing seen by different observers. There is only one phenomenon here, not
two. But it is spread along a continuum. At one end are small, closed, often
binary systems, of very general application, intersecting with each other but
each having, in principle, their own distinct realization [...] At the other end
are much more specific, loose, more shifting sets of features, realized not
discretely but in bundles called ‘Words’, like bench realizing ‘for sitting
on’, ‘backless’, ‘for more than one’, ‘hard surface’; the system networks
formed by these features are local and transitory rather than being global
and persistent (Halliday 1992:63)

Sinclair’s theory of lexis is embodied in the idiom principle. It is a

provocative theory of collocation, in that it eschews many of the assumptions
of mainstream corpus linguistics. Sinclair does not view tagging (marking up
of the corpus) as essential, and analyses word forms without reference to the

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lemma or base word. Thus goes and went are analysed separately from the
base form go, as though they are separate lexical items. As we have seen in
the previous chapter, Sinclair holds collocation to be a purely statistical and
syntagmatic feature of language: collocations do not have to be fully
grammatical, and are not necessarily limited to the boundaries of the phrase
or the clause. And as with Nattinger and DeCarrico’s approach, this feature
alone makes Sinclair’s idea of collocation a very different notion to the
mainstream view in lexicology and phraseology studies.
The starting point of the idiom principle is that the collocational behaviour
of a word is not an issue of individual item selection, but depends on the
unstable and shifting nature of the word as a whole unit and the indeterminate
nature of its grammatical class, at least in a historical perspective. Sinclair
points to word blends as clear instances of items that have lost their status as
separate words in English (because, of course, maybe, another, altogether,
alright etc.). Many of these expressions represent the kind of
grammaticalisation observed in the development of pidgin languages: the
gradual formation of grammatical words from bound lexical phrases
(Traugott and Heine 1991). For example, Tok Pisin uses the lexical bye and
bye and finis from English as grammatical particles of aspect. Words are
therefore not fixed in position but may be used along a continuum from pure
vocabulary items to features of grammar. This degree of continuum from one
category to another is also evident in in lexical paradigms. Hence suppletion
is seen in forms such as went (originally derived from the verb to wend),
which historically drifted into the paradigm for the verb to go. The
conjugation paradigm of a verb may be a cognitive reality, but its
constituents are historically contingent and unrelated.
This kind of long-term change suggests that the upper level boundary
between the lexical item and the phrase is in constant flux. But there is also
evidence for what might be seen as the development of larger-than-word
lexical items in the contemporary language. Nattinger and DeCarrico
(1992:24) and Willis (1993:88) refer to holophrastic phrases: prefabricated
chunks of language which lead a clichéd or marginal existence, including
wannabe, allgone, watsup? Similarly, high frequency content words (such as
the delexical verbs get, make, set, take) also depend on complements or
particles to be fully lexical semantic units (get even, get on, make for, make
way, set up, set off, take place, take part etc.). Sinclair has suggested that the
many combinations in which these words enter must form a large part of the
total lexicon (rather than a simple count of single lexical items), and that
many texts may be characterised as being largely ‘delexicalized’
(1987c:323). This modifies somewhat the traditional view of lexical density
(Ure 1971), which relies on a count of lexical forms and does not normally

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take account of grammatical items as part of longer or meaningful

expressions.
On the basis of such evidence, it is possible to dismantle the traditional
view of the strictly delimited word-class. Sinclair and his co-workers on the
Cobuild dictionary have consistently emphasised the unique nature of single
grammatical items, and their main argument has been that high frequency
items tend to have unique lexical properties in comparison with the rest of
their traditional word class. For example, the very frequent preposition of
does not share the properties of other canonical prepositions in adjunct
phrases or as the indirect complements of verbs (Sinclair 1991). Some high
frequency lexical words are also seen to be ‘grammaticalised’, to such an
extent that no two lexical words could be seen to have exactly the same
collocational properties. At the heart of this view is the notion of the ‘pattern’
(Hunston and Francis: 1998): the idea that grammatical items and lexical
items are chosen in tandem with a specific formula in mind rather than
selected individually or ‘compositionally’.
On the basis of a large scale corpus study of nominals in English, Willis
(1993) has shown how classes of word merge into one another and how some
subsets of the noun have very different properties to the traditional class as a
whole. For example, only a subset of all nouns modify the semantics of
delexicalised verbs (give a smile, take a chance) or are involved in projecting
clause structures after that (the belief that, the argument that). This subset
differs from those nouns which can take infinitive verb forms (a decision to,
the claim to) or complex nominals with of (behaviour of, arrival of). Thus
nouns do not all share the same collocational properties, and these ‘families’
are more specific and consistent than the notion of ‘abstract noun’, which is
sometimes assumed to be a catch-all for nouns which become involved in
complex phraseology. (I have also suggested that the distribution of these
nominals between the different categories of noun is different in other
languages - Gledhill 1999).
Willis also notes the rhetorical role of nouns in structures such as sentence
stems: the (main / important / other) thing is that... the (question / problem /
difficulty) is that... He argues that the main feature of these expressions is not
the family of noun involved, but the fact that each entails (or collocates with)
a further expression in the projected dependent clause, in this case a signal of
some solution to a problem (1993:88). Rhetorical functions collocate
therefore with specific nominal phrases. In a similar study, Francis (1993)
has discussed the pre-emptive properties of what she calls semi-idiomatic
phrases as in put a brave face on it, ‘semi-pre-packaged’ idioms with clear
communicative goals (not the foggiest / faintest idea) or prefacing items
(such as is a case of) where a current discourse topic is compared to one

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familiar to the reader (1993:143-6). Altenberg (1991) has similarly argued

that many collocations extend beyond the traditional bounds of the phrase,
and are therefore not analysed in mainstream lexicology. He points to the
cognitive sub-system of ‘amplifier collocations’ such as absolutely which
occurs with superlative adjectives, and perfectly which collocates with
positive and negative adjectives. The correspondence between grammatical
form and semantic or discourse functions hardly seems to fit into a traditional
paradigm of phrase structure syntax or feature-based semantics.
While the nature of the word-class and the word-boundary has been
reassessed on the basis of corpus work, so has the relationship between
grammatical collocation and more fundamental syntactic structures.
Grammatical collocation traditionally involves the collocation of
grammatical items with a limited set of lexical items (Howarth 1998:184). In
her work on the Cobuild corpus, Francis demonstrates how a high-frequency
pronoun (it), a conjunction (that), an adjective (possible) and a noun (reason)
each have their own lexico-grammar, and interact with increasingly delimited
forms of syntax (1993:140). Francis finds that it is likely to occur as a
grammatical extraposed form in adjectival complement clauses: they often
find it difficult to explain why or they often find explaining why difficult.
Whereas a descriptive grammar might present this as a general pattern,
Francis points out that the structure is limited to just two main verbs find and
make (98% of all occurrences of extraposed it). The structure in turn
collocates with a very restricted set of adjectives (related to the concepts of
ease and probability) and to two specific expressions make it clear / likely
that. Francis also finds consistent patterns (1993:46) for the adjective
possible, which mostly occurs with superlatives in the frame as X as possible
or after whether / if... Similarly, that in NP complement clauses (as in the
idea that, the advantage that, the chance that) has a limited series of
structures that can be classified semantically, such as illocutionary processes
(allegation that, contention that) and thought processes followed by results
(analysis that, realisation that) (1993:149). When used in NP complement
clauses, the noun reason has two patterns: introducing an event (the reason
he fell... the reason I did this...) and an expression of contrast with the
collocation ‘for the simple reason that...’ which introduces an explanation
rather than an event (for the simple reason that he was drunk, for simple
reason that it was a good idea) Francis (1993:147) concludes that
grammatical items and syntactic structures (such as extraposition,
complement structures and so on) operate selectively with a limited set of
lexical items. Hence very frequent grammatical structures map onto
consistent patterns of meaning. As with Hoey’s view of lexical cohesion,
Francis claims that collocations are chosen as a strategy of communication

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rather than simply to express complex ideas in a succinct form. As Sinclair

puts it ‘grammar is part of the management of the text rather than the focus of
the meaning-creation’. (1991:8).
The analysis of grammatical collocation has demonstrated that the
boundary between grammatical and lexical items is a relative one. Sinclair
and other corpus linguists have long argued that linguistic behaviour is not
openly accessible to introspection and can only be properly examined on the
basis of authentic text analysis. Native speakers are typically unaware of the
collocational structures that are systematically found in computer-based
corpora, and are certainly not able to guess the relative probability of one
structure compared with the next. For example, Kennedy (1984) has reported
that 63% of the use of at is limited to 150 collocations, with at least being the
most frequent. Similarly, Krishnamurthy (1987:70) reports that many
common items have very restricted collocations, such as the 70% co-
occurrence of refer with to, while 100% of the uses of encrusted are as an
adjective rather than a verb, and backsliding as a noun rather than a verb.
Carter (1998: 197) has noted that these very consistent collocational
properties and probabilities are significant evidence of lexico-grammatical
competence, and lead to a more probabilistic view of a native speaker’s
mental lexicon.
However, not all linguists are happy with the corpus-based analysis of
grammatical items. Moon (1987) has suggested that an emphasis on context,
especially with high frequency words, has led to an over-abundance of
meaning distinctions where, in lexicography at least, the analysts runs the
risk of ‘losing the semantic integrity of the word.’ (1987: 102). She argues
that the collocational analysis of grammatical items can not reveal much if
the item happens to collocate with others at a distance, especially
grammatical words which express discourse or clause functions (and, but,
however) or collocations which appear to require quite a large cotext such as
(so ... as) as Kaye (1990:151) notes.
While this is an important consideration, Moon’s point is aimed at
delimiting examples and establishing essential meanings for entries in a
dictionary. If we are considering the lexico-grammar of a particular style or
register, the corpus evidence, as we have summarised it above, appears to
strongly favour the discussion of grammatical items and grammatical
categories in relation to collocation. While discourse analysts may be
tempted to conduct corpus analysis on the basis of lexical items, the notion of
the lexico-grammar suggests that phraseology is of equal importance in the
meaning-creation of the text. And as we have seen, an analysis of
grammatical items can be used to ‘trawl’ for the fundamental phraseology of
the text. Grammatical items are the starting point, but grammatical

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collocation is not just simply about the grammatical items themselves. The
theory of lexico-grammar implies that grammatical items are simply
consistent elements in longer-range fundamental phraseology.
We have seen so far that a statistical analysis of collocation may be a
sufficient basis for establishing the basic collocational properties of words.
We have seen that grammatical collocation is an important feature of the
general language, at least in English, and that certain studies have posited a
fundamental role for collocation as a bridge between the notion of the word
and the text. However in practice, as I have noted in the Introduction, the
statistical notion of collocation needs to be restricted (in terms of the internal
cohesion of the expression) and also requires a more contextual interpretation
(in terms of its place in the general discourse). These issues are well known
in the field of corpus linguistics and lead us to a wider discussion of
approaches to corpus analysis and the identification of collocations in
specific text archives.

3. Corpus Linguistics

Corpus linguistics involves the collating of linguistic features from a

computer-held archive of texts, where the corpus is representative of some
part of the language. The use of computers for data collection has not only
entailed a massive increase in corpus size (from thousands to millions of
words), but also a transformation in theories of linguistic description.
Burnard (1992:2) states that this approach is so different from other types of
linguistics that it necessarily entails the ‘development of new, pragmatically
derived linguistic models’. Leech (1992) similarly emphasises that many
corpus analysts share a set of core assumptions which are not widespread in
mainstream theoretical linguistics: an interest in the empirical, quantitative
description of language in use. According to Leech, the main advantage of
the computer-held corpus is that there is a sense of exhaustive or ‘complete’
use of data, as opposed to highly selective use of data in other linguistic
fields (1992:112). A second advantage is the availability of ‘test corpora’ to
quantitatively test findings worked out on other archives of texts. A corpus-
based model of linguistic behaviour is therefore falsifiable because it can be
tested against fresh data. At the same time, the text corpus can be
distinguished from a text archive or reference-tool such as the Trésor de la
langue française. The corpus allows for open-ended linguistic analysis (the
archive limits the format of searches) and permits linguistic intervention
(especially tagging) of the texts in the corpus. Corpus linguistics has built up
a reputation in such diverse areas as speech recognition modelling (Church

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and Mercer 1993), word association tests (Church and Hanks 1990), natural
language processing (especially the application of syntactic notation: Leech
and Fligelstone 1992), general lexicography (Clear 1987, Sinclair 1987),
semantic labelling for dictionaries and language research (Vossen et al.
1986), machine translation (Schubert 1986), the development of
terminological knowledge banks (Ahmad et al. 1991) and the development of
language teaching materials and syllabuses (Willis 1990, Johns and King
1993).
Generally speaking, there are three different schools in English-speaking
corpus linguistics. Firstly, there has been much corpus-based work in
computational linguistics and terminology, with a long tradition of statistical
modelling (Butler 1985a, Oakes 1996). Secondly, descriptive linguistics has
concentrated on the tagging and parsing of corpora, usually within a
generative framework (the Lancaster school: McEnery and Wilson 1996).
Similarly, corpora are also tagged for text type analysis (Biber, Conrad and
Reppen 1998). A third tradition involves the development of corpora for
applications such as language learning (as emphasised by Barnbrook 1996) or
dictionary-building (in a continuation of the Cobuild project: Sinclair and
Renouf 1991) as well as the statistical analysis of texts in authorship studies
(Oppenheim 1988). The third approach usually entails an emphasis on
statistical properties of the texts rather than parsing procedures. Since I have
adopted a view of collocation from Sinclair’s and Halliday’s perspective, the
third approach is particularly relevant to my methods of corpus design and
analysis.
The Brown corpus of one million words was one of the first electronic
stores of texts for the analysis of English, with the underlying aim to be as
representative of the general language as possible (Kučera and Francis 1967).
The London-Oslo-Bergen corpus (LOB, Svartvik and Quirk 1980, Svartvik
1992a/b, Leech 1991) was also built up to one million words and was one of
the first to attempt coverage of different language varieties, including 15
types of written text – although the texts were artificially curtailed, with a
maximum length of 2 000 words. Nevertheless, LOB constituted for some
time a major source of data for the study of text types (Biber 1986 et seq.).
While the first generation of corpora were developed for general linguistic
description, the second generation aimed at maximum coverage of the
language for the purposes of dictionary-building. These included, in the UK,
Birmingham’s Bank of English (once known as the Cobuild corpus: Sinclair
1991) and the British National Corpus (BNC) of Oxford University and
Longman (Burnard 1992). These corpora quickly built up the number of texts
to hundreds of millions of words by accessing the electronic press and other
networks that became available in the early 1990s. Although both corpora

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had at one point over two billion words (Sinclair 1993a, Rundell and Stock
1992), each corpus has recently been limited to a selection of just over 100
million words. Another notable corpus project, the Cambridge Language
Survey, attempted to build up corpora and develop software in order to
compare seven major languages with particular emphasis on developing
agreed codings (tags) for semantic, functional and syntactic categories
(Atkins, Clear and Ostler 1992). These lexicographic corpora have now been
joined by a third generation of more fragmented text collections, including
dialect corpora, spoken corpora, restricted language corpora and other
specialist text collections (Svartvik 1992:12, Biber, Conrad and Reppen
1998).
As corpora grow in size and complexity, ‘representativeness’ or an idea of
what proportion of texts should be included in the corpus has proven to be a
major stumbling block. In his comparison of three major English language
corpora (Brown, LOB, and Cobuild), Ljung (1991) points out that within the
most frequent 1 000 items of each corpus, 204 words are not shared. Such
differences seem to undermine the claims of the corpus-builders that their
corpora are representative of the language in general. Ljung further notes
very important genre differences between the corpora, especially Cobuild,
with its large number of high frequency abstract nouns dealing with domains
of behaviour, geometric shape and politics - the kinds of lexical
preoccupations to be found in journalism (1991:249). Because of the wide
availability of journalistic texts in the initial years of corpus analysis,
linguists pointed out that the data in large corpora were susceptible to stylistic
bias (Rundell and Stock 1992). While quantitative representation is a
problem, there are also artificial barriers to inclusion which arbitrarily restrict
the nature of the corpus. For example, Burnard (1992) noted that his own
corpus, the BNC had a no-translations policy which eliminated such
influential texts as the Bible. Similarly, Collins and Peters (1988) have
questioned the motivation behind the text categories of several corpora. They
note for instance that LOB gives as much weighting to belles lettres,
biographies and essays as to the Press or learned and scientific writings.
Nevertheless, genres are by their very nature unequal, and it is perhaps
unreasonable to describe the whole language on the basis of equally
represented text-types. One might argue that the spoken language and
dialogue should make up the vast majority of any general language corpus,
since the corpus may wish to represent exposure (from an individual’s point
of view) rather than textual variety. The other possibility is that each
recognised register or genre should have an equal footing because the
language system is not wholly represented in the more frequently
encountered varieties. These are clearly fundamental questions but with very

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few straightforward solutions. It is for this reason that it may be prudent not
to scale down the corpus, but to favour the analysis of specialised genres.
However, as noted above in terms of the discourse community, even the
question of representativeness of a single subject matter (cancer research)
appears to be a complex issue.

4. Corpus Analysis and Languages for Specific Purposes

Whereas corpus linguistics has tended to favour the construction of large

scale text collections for the analysis of the ‘general language’, much less
work has been carried out on corpora of specific language varieties. McEnery
and Wilson (1996) mention that there has been some work on spoken and
written variation, but very little work on specific text types. General corpora
tend to include sections of technical texts for comparative purposes, but
understandably these have been very broad in scope, largely because it has
been felt necessary to collect a broad range of subject specialisms.
Nevertheless, in the field of English for Specific Purposes as mentioned
above in Chapter One, a number of linguists have carried out studies on very
specific corpora, including Myers (1989), Kretzenbacher (1990), Banks
(1994a), Salager-Meyer (1992), Williams (1996), Dubois (1997) and Biber,
Conrad and Reppen (1998). A small number of studies have so far dealt with
grammatical collocation and genre analysis (Gledhill 1995a and 1995b), or
systematic analysis of clusters of grammatical features in technical texts
(especially Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1998).
There are a number of studies which have specifically targeted
collocations in science within the field of terminology (Thomas 1993, Baker,
Francis and Tognini-Bonelli 1993, Pearson 1998). These studies follow the
tradition in terminology which distinguishes between collocations in the
general language and those in the LSP, a notion which is widespread but
which has also been widely criticised (Bloor and Bloor 1985). The position is
summed up tersely by Sager et al. (1980:231): the potential for collocation in
the general language is freer than in the special language. Benson et al.
(1986) have been the principal proponents of this view and have argued that
LGP and LSP collocations can be distinguished in terms of their syntactic
behaviour. For example, in compound nominals in the LGP, head nouns
become more specific as in cabinet reshuffle and drug pusher and the
attributive nature of the second element can be reinforced by reformulating
with ‘of’ or other grammatical items: a reshuffle of the cabinet, a pusher of
drugs, a booster for brakes. However in LSP compounds such as measles
vaccine, jet engine, house arrest such deconstruction is not possible. He

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claims that LSP nominal groups must have a generic-specific internal

structure that distinguishes them from their LGP counterparts (moving from
specific to generic). The lack of reformulative potential of a multiword term
therefore suggests a systematic means of distinguishing between fixed LSP
terms and looser LGP phrases. However, this type of distinction reinforces
the traditional view that the LSP is merely a series of grammatical
restrictions, and seems to arbitrarily assign LSP or LGP status to items which
may have very different distributions (for most observers brake booster
appears to be an LSP item, regardless of grammatical mutability).
Thomas (1993) provides a more text-based account of LSP phraseology
when she describes the types of collocation that occur in a computer based
terminological term bank. She finds that in the search for collocational nodes
to prioritise as dictionary entries, LSP phrases may use similar resources to
the LGP but their predictive collocational elements vary in position from the
LGP as the expression moves from left to right. Thomas notes that
collocational variability, where the node word is highly predictive of the left
or right collocate, affects the lexicographer’s choice of base word. Sinclair
similarly refers to this phenomenon as a statistical problem of ‘up or down
direction of collocability’ (1987c:330). Contrary to the impression that LSP
style is ‘highly nominal’, Thomas notes that LSP verb phrases have a ‘high
range of functions and occurrence’ including transitives (occlude, induce),
intransitives (phase-separate, hydrogen-bond), phrasal intransitives
(denatures into, localises in) and are particularly prevalent in passive phrases
(is synthesised in, are conserved) (1993:60). More generally, frequent verbs
in the LGP become highly predictive of object nouns in the LSP (to boot a
computer, to create a file) (1993:55). Sager et al. similarly note that the
collocability of verbs is limited to phrasal units while nominal groups have
taken over the function of representing mental categories, conceptual
phenomena and operations (1980:86). They note a tendency for grammatical
themes or subjects and descriptive predicates, and the predominant pattern of
noun + [copula] + Property / of + Property (material - shape - design)
(1980:188). They also note inversion in declarative sentences where a past
participle (such as Attached to the X is a Y...) introduces elements at the
thematic beginning of the sentence.
Despite the rarity of corpus work on scientific texts, linguists and
stylisticians have identified a vast range of grammatical and lexical properties
of virtually every imaginable variety of language. Muller (1968, 1977) has
notably established a well known methodology of word counts to establish
different authors’ styles (Oppenheim 1988, Potter 1990:411). Among corpus
analyses of style, Johansson (1982) reports on the untagged analysis of four
types of writing from the LOB corpus where he analyses the relative

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frequency of function words. Fox (1993) has analysed the frequency of then
following sentence subjects as a characteristic of the language of law
enforcement. Choueka et al. (1983) studied collocation in the language of the
New York Times. Butler (1993) studied discontinuous collocational
frameworks in Spanish magazines and found that prose articles can be shown
to be different to interviews. He found that frameworks contain more textual
information in the former and interpersonal, discursive phrases in the latter.
Finally, Collot (1991) has examined the use of comparative constructions in
e-mail communication. As noted above, with some exceptions (Butler 1993,
Banks 1994b, Gledhill 1996 and Williams 1996) the focus of work even in
such a large area as stylistics or register studies has been on grammatical
categories rather than on collocation and phraseology.

5. The Status of Corpus Evidence

In this section I examine the philosophy underlying different approaches to

corpus data, in particular in relation to the notion of item selection (which
lexical or grammatical features to identify) and item identification (the use of
tags or other methods).
As can be seen from our discussion of the idiom principle, Sinclair and his
colleagues assume that there should be as little human involvement as
possible in the construction and analysis of a corpus. All grammatical
evidence should come from real examples analysed as automatically as
possible as opposed to invented ones analysed introspectively. Sinclair
distinguishes in this respect between the natural but untidy feel of examples
taken from a corpus with the grammatical but odd nature of examples used in
theoretical grammars. Although controversial, his main point has been
conceded by many generative linguists, who now use corpora if not to elicit
data, then at least to check their hypotheses (Blackwell 1987, McEnery and
Wilson 1996). The principal research method of the Cobuild research group
of the 1980s (Sinclair 1981 et seq., Fox 1993, Francis 1985, Clear 1987,
Krishnamurthy 1987, Renouf 1987a/b, Hunston and Francis 1998) and
researchers who were influenced by the approach (Miall 1992, Gledhill 1996
as well as workers in Cobuild’s successor project, the Bank of English) has
been to eschew the traditional categories of linguistic analysis to the point
where they analyse raw data that has had no prior linguistic treatment (or
‘tagging’). On the other hand, many corpus linguists (Leech and Fligelstone
1992, Garside, Leech and Sampson 1987, McEnery and Wilson 1996) are
involved in work that changes the format of the texts that they are working
with, whether it is by transcribing prosodic markers from spoken texts or by

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implementing automatic tagging (marking of word class and syntactic

function).
Although Sinclair’s ‘statistical / textual’ view of collocation has been
influential, it is not generally accepted by corpus workers outside the Firthian
or Hallidayan tradition. Unlike the main thrust of Sinclair’s work, the
majority of corpus research is conducted on tagged or marked-up corpora,
and can benefit from the use of pre-defined categories. A search by a parser
or a tagged corpus analyser can be initiated by asking the computer for
‘nominals followed by conjunctions’ (category tags) or ‘indirect
complements’ (functional tags) and so on. In other words, whereas Sinclair’s
approach has been to see collocation in all recurrent lexical forms, others
limit the kind of expressions that the computer counts as acceptable. The
tagging approach is instead used in systems for automated parsing or
collocation retrieval (in terminology, the information sciences and in
abstracting), where the need to cut down on combinatorial possibilities is
considerable (Sparck-Jones 1971, Choueka et al. 1983, Frohman 1990,
Ahmad et al. 1991, Bazelli, Pazienza and Velardi 1992, Busch 1992).
Tagged corpora are also used widely to test the hypotheses of formal and
generative grammars (McEnery and Wilson 1996 provide an overview of
these studies). These approaches traditionally privilege the ‘semantic /
syntactic’ view of collocation I proposed above, largely because they use data
to confirm rather than to define instances of collocation. A typical study
begins with a definition of collocational relation between words using a
lexicalist model and as proceeds to classify any fixed expressions within the
framework of that model (for example, Mel’čuk 1988, Fontenelle 1994).
Furthermore, since idiomaticity is seen as a structural or formal functional
problem within the generative framework, corpus data have also been used to
demonstrate the typical grammatical profile of fixed expressions (Ringle
1982, Abeillé 1995). In these studies the fixed expressions are taken as
‘given’ and derived from existing studies on idiomaticity. Annotated corpora
can of course be used to capture the kinds of combination that Sinclair is
interested in, but they generally tend to rely on an automatic parser which has
already divided and marked the text up into syntactic categories and
functions. As a consequence, these approaches conceive of collocations
between existing grammatical classes or functions (for example: noun + verb)
and do not therefore initiate searches for the kinds of grammatical collocation
identified by Sinclair and his colleagues (discussed above).
As an example of a collocation-retrieval approach, Smadja (1993,199) has
implemented a program that initially finds collocations on a statistical basis
and then uses a ‘syntactic filter’ to eliminate non-phrases. He tests the results

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of the automatic system against four generally-accepted principles of

collocation:

Principle 1 Collocations are arbitrary (1993:146).

Collocations are combined as a lexical choice which may not have any
semantic or syntactic explanation. This can be seen between languages,
where word-to-word translations have different distributions. (enfoncer la
porte - to break down the door, enfoncer un clou - to hammer a nail in).

Principle 2 Collocations are domain-dependent (1993:146)

Collocations have a very specific distribution in terms of technical jargon
and terminology.

Principle 3 Collocations are recurrent (1993:147)

Collocations can be accounted for statistically, that is they are not
accidents of occurrence or independent variables and are established as a
recognisable part of the language (a point also made by Church and Hanks
1989).

Principle 4 Collocations are cohesive lexical clusters (1993:147)

Collocations are internally consistent with elements which are predictive
of others. Although this is unlike Halliday’s textual definition of cohesion,
there is a sense of unity and ‘texture’ that Halliday and Hasan (1976) refer to
within collocations such as heavy trading, or agree to.

Smadja (1993) suggests that at present his system is good at identifying

‘small’ collocations (especially phrases which conform to Principles 3 and 4).
The types of collocation that Smadja’s system is able to identify are listed
below:

Type 1 Predictive collocation.

In this type of collocation, one or more elements in the phrase may predict
the others, but not necessarily the other way round (make and decision for
example). These collocations are usually flexible in that they may undergo
transformations or reformulation without disturbing basic meaning (Smadja
1993:399) and correspond to Cowie’s (1981) and Benson’s (1989) restricted
collocations.

Type 2 Rigid noun phrases.

These are ‘important concepts in a domain.’ (Smadja 1993:148) such as
stock market and Dow Jones and have been previously studied by Choueka et

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al. (1983) in their study of the New York Times corpus and by Burnard
(1992:15) who terms them ‘text-oriented’ co-occurrences.

Type 3 Phrasal templates.

These are collocations which include very free elements within a restricted
structure (such as Stockmarket [X] rose / was up / fell [number] (points) to /
at [number]). These correspond to Renouf and Sinclair’s (1991) collocational
frameworks and Nattinger and DeCarrico’s (1982) phrasal constraints.

Smadja (1996) claims an identification rate of around 70%. While apparently

successful, this means that 30% of the terms identified by the Xtract system
are not valid collocations. The essential problem here is that analysts such as
Smadja pre-define a collocation as a valid grammatical phrase, whereas
Sinclair and others are prepared to accept collocations which are not
constituents of the same phrase or even the same clause. Another difficulty
with Smadja’s approach is the concept of the non-phrase and the means by
which it is possible or desirable to eliminate combinations encountered in the
corpus. Non-phrases according to Smadja (1993/1996) are combinations
which can not be analysed by a parser and theory identification is therefore
dependent on the quality of the parser rather than the quality of the initial
data.
From a statistical perspective, Kjellmer (1984:163) has also argued that
restrictions are necessary because statistical analysis may throw up either
randomly recurrent word combinations (hence although he, hall to may occur
but are not acceptable phrases) or unusual grammatically restricted sequences
(green ideas, yesterday’s evening). He claims that valid phraseological units
are only to be found at the intersection of the two (last night, try to).
However, Kjellmer (1990) gives much more scope to grammatical
collocation than other linguists working on tagged corpora. For example, he
finds evidence to suggest that certain grammatical classes are more
productive in collocation. Articles and prepositions are involved in the
greatest relative number of collocations although their collocates are hard to
predict. Singular and mass nouns are similarly highly collocational, but are
more predictable in that they have very strong patterns immediately before
function words and tend to be premodified in limited ways (1990:167). In
addition, verbs have the highest rate of co-occurrence with closed-class
items, indicating the important role of phrasal verbs in English, a point also
noted by the Cobuild group (Krishnamurthy 1987). These findings are
commensurate with many of Sinclair’s findings. They also serve to show
however that the ‘statistical / textual’ approach is an ideal, and much work

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being carried out from Sinclair’s perspective does in fact exploit tagged
corpora.
Perhaps one of the more hotly contested points has been over the extent to
which it is necessary to mark up the corpus grammatically. The
‘collocationalists’ and followers of Sinclair argue that since they do not
impose traditional grammatical categories, only their approach can achieve
original insights about language:

If [...] the objective is to observe and record behaviour and make

generalisations based on observations, a means of recording structures must
be devised which depends as little as possible on theory. The more
superficial, the better. (Sinclair 1987b:107)

Conversely, Leech and Fligelstone (1992) and others consider that the
counting of concordance items is at best ‘a trivial facility’ and that the only
significant data can come from annotated corpora. Aarts is of the opinion that
without some degree of syntactic classification, a corpus is useless:

[...] as everyone knows, the comparison of corpora containing just raw text
cannot go beyond linguistically rather trivial observations. (1992:180)

Several corpus linguists have debated the relative success of automatic

parsing and tagging (Brekke 1991). Souter (1990) calculated the range and
distribution of 8522 syntactic structures found by a ‘componence parser’
(componence rules are syntactic and functional phrase structure algorithms:
such as Subject_NGP_det head). He found that just over 70% of these rules
are used only once in his corpus. He concludes that if these results were
projected to an even bigger corpus, ‘a comprehensive grammar for English
could be as open-ended as its vocabulary.’ (1990:194). On the other hand,
Briscoe (1990) has dismissed this kind of argument. He claims that although
‘all grammars leak slightly’, there is no evidence for a group of deviant or
unique grammatical constructs, arguing that the existence of even large
numbers of unique grammatical constructs does not invalidate the
applicability of a general underlying generative syntactic principle.
Conversely, Church and Mercer (1993:4) state that parsers are useful for
understanding ‘who did what to whom’, but are less useful for predicting
likely usage in authentic language. The other disadvantage of parsers is that
they have, according to Church and Mercer ‘little success in word class or
word sense disambiguation’ (1993:9).
The benefits of tagging and parsing can not be dismissed lightly. Clearly
any system which categorises linguistic evidence would benefit from a
computational way of counting and sorting the data (McEnery and Wilson
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1996, Barnbrook 1996). In this light, some tag sets have attempted to
incorporate ‘discourse items’. Svartvik (1993:24) has proposed a 170 tag
system with labels such as greeting, fluency device, hedge and so on.
Linguists who impose tags on a text in such a ‘manual’ fashion are faced with
the difficult task of lemmatisation, whether to treat forms such as be, is, are
as one or different word types. Lemmatisation is particularly criticised by
Sinclair (1991) and Francis (1993) who point out that it is a redundant
process because collocational patterns tend to reveal differences between
word types: the collocations of be are different to the collocations of is and
this distinction is effectively eliminated if both are counted as the same
lexical item. There is also some statistical evidence in support of this.
Youmans, in his analysis of the ‘velocity’ or rate of change of frequency of
new words in texts found that lemmatisation does not significantly change
the curves of type / token ratios (1991:766). Whatever the accuracy of
tagging and parsing, I hope to demonstrate below that the quality of analysis
relies just as much on the depth of preparation of material as on the formulae
used to arrive at automatic analysis.
The fact remains that manual analysis of unrefined concordances can still
reveal much interesting data. This is especially true of features of discourse
which do not have categorical forms (such as evaluation, modality,
grammatical metaphor, discourse anaphora and so on.) as the work of Stubbs
(1996) and others has demonstrated.

One of the more fundamental debates that have been conducted in corpus
linguistics centres on Sinclair’s claim that corpus work must attempt to
account for the naturalness of authentic data rather than a theoretical search
for an abstract notion of grammaticality. However, many linguists warn
against seeing the corpus as a guarantee of truly objective data. In Fillmore’s
(1992) analysis of the use of the word risk he demonstrates that the word has
a unique lexico-grammar in the language in that ‘running a risk’
conceptualises harm as a result of an action, while ‘taking a risk’ sees harm
as a result of a goal. But he cannot see how a computer could ever come to
determine such a pattern, or how it could rule out alternative expressions.
Chafe takes a similar stance:

A corpus cannot tell us what is not possible... Should it ever come about
that linguistics can be carried out without the intervention and suffering of
a native-speaker, I will probably lose interest in the enterprise. (Chafe
1992:59)

In a sense, this argument could be turned around against tagging, since Chafe
and Fillmore are discussing linguistic features that appear to be beyond
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automatic parsing, but are not beyond more basic empirical quantification. In
any case, Chafe, Fillmore and others claim that Sinclair has missed the point
about intuition, and has ruled out the important function of negative data in
constructing a model of syntactic principles. For them it is important for the
model to be able to explain why certain features of language do not occur,
and the corpus does not provide this explanatory adequacy. They also point
out that there is nothing inauthentic about a native-speaker’s intuitions about
examples and counter examples (although as we have seen, other
generativists have made much use of corpora to test their hypotheses for
positive data).
Chafe’s point essentially contrasts the generative linguist’s preoccupation
with selected counter-examples with the empirical linguist’s interest in
authentically occurring data which is often more difficult to analyse.
Sinclair’s approach is not concerned with grammaticality but with an
account of naturalness in language. Native intuition and invented examples
may be enough to explain the underlying syntactic principles of potential
expression, but they are inappropriate when we need to address issues of
style and textual acceptability. He argues that although the corpus replaces
introspection in linguistic analysis (essentially guessing at data and inventing
examples), the computer still implies the use of human intuition (a native
speaker interpretation, a linguist’s skill in explanation), a factor that Fillmore
and Chafe appear to have overlooked.
In addition, a corpus of authentic texts is undoubtedly the product of a
human intuition, but the linguistic behaviour used to produce authentic texts
is uninhibited, unselfconscious and natural. The same can not be said for
invented examples or examples created to prove some grammatical point.
Sinclair cites a continuum of examples from cryptical to explicit: we
searched (most cryptical), we searched all night, we searched all night for
the missing climbers (most explicit) (1984:206). He asks at what point or in
what context each of these kinds of utterance would be deemed to be natural,
and suggests that most authentic text occurs at some point in-between. In
natural speech, therefore, there is a happy medium between the cryptical and
the overtly explicit. This argument for authentic examples has been
particularly relevant in the field of lexicography, where the examples chosen
for each entry in his Cobuild dictionary were not designed for lexicographic
purposes but taken from authentic texts. Furthermore, Sinclair claims that
the internal grammatical relations of the sentence are not relevant when one
attempts to take account of the function or natural feel of the sentence in
context. As with Hoey’s discussion of lexical cohesion, we can see how
Sinclair’s approach moves our attention away from words in a sentence-
based grammar to items with a definite textual function.

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The discussion in this present section has concentrated on the quality of

data analysed in corpus linguistics. I conclude that a tagged corpus and a
syntactic parser are not immediately necessary for an analysis of typical
corpus style, and note that such processes may indeed by inappropriate for a
genre analysis of the type I envisage, at least at the present time. Since my
primary aim is to establish a general phraseology of research articles, I hope
to show below that instances of collocation can be fruitfully identified on the
initial basis of statistical analysis rather than resorting to formulae and
syntactic parsing of the sort proposed by Smadja and others.

In the preceding sections, I have set out Halliday and Sinclair’s perspectives
on discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. Halliday establishes the notion
of register as probable expression, and emphasises the changing role of
linguistic features as they are used in different rhetorical contexts. In
addition, we have seen that Halliday and Sinclair’s view of the lexico-
grammar prioritises the role of grammatical collocation and grammatical
items, and my corpus analysis below therefore concentrates on the
phraseology of these items and their distribution within the corpus. The
following sections discuss the main steps involved in the corpus analysis and
attempt to implement the ‘statistical / textual’ analysis of the corpus as a first
stage in the phraseological analysis of the research article genre.

6. The Corpus and the Discourse Community

A corpus is a text assembled according to explicit design criteria for a

specific purpose, and therefore the rich variety of corpora reflects the
diversity of their designers’ objectives. (Atkins, Clear and Ostler 1992:13)

It is now necessary to set out the principles underlying my choice of texts for
the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus (PSC). In brief, the PSC contains:

• 150 research articles from 22 different journals on cancer research and

pharmacology.
• 500 000 words of text, excluding reference sections, tables and footnotes.

I propose to analyse these texts in terms of their different subsections (Titles,

Abstracts, Introductions, and so on) and conduct the analysis by examining
the collocations associated with those grammatical items which have been
found to be statistically significant within each section.
I have suggested above that corpus analysis presents considerable
methodological advantages for a description of languages for specific
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purposes. In the first instance, the rhetorical aims of the writers are known
and can be prioritised in the analysis: this is not an anonymous collection of
texts. In addition, we have seen that while there are many studies of
phraseology and lexico-grammar in the general language, few specialist
varieties have benefited from a large-scale corpus analysis of this kind. The
corpus does not represent the register of science writing, but instead focuses
on one genre (the research article) dealing with one very specific discourse
(cancer research). The usual problem of representativeness is therefore
minimised, although not entirely eliminated.
We have seen above that, historically speaking, corpus projects have
tended to opt to represent an entire register or language variety. These
projects have often found it difficult to delimit boundaries for their
constituent texts. For example, Renouf (1987b) states that the texts used in
the Cobuild corpus range from very broad registers (non-fiction, procedures,
argument-positional texts and narrative) to very specific genres (surveys, the
NATO-corpus, the Sizewell enquiry corpus). Since such a disparate collection
of texts is not clearly defined, Sinclair (1993), Atkins, Clear and Ostler
(1992), Ahmad et al. (1991) and others have argued for a more systematic
approach to text types in corpus linguistics. Sinclair (1993c:6-7) proposes
four principles of corpus design which I adopt in the following sections:

1. The choice of texts should be governed by a stated view of language in

communication.
2. The variables determining the choice of texts should be distinct and
identified.
3. The component texts should be clearly identified, described and documented.
4. The proportions of different text types should be clearly stated and
concomitant with principle 1).

6.1 The Language View of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus

As stated earlier, the research article – despite its variety of forms - is seen as
a privileged statement of public research and is thus a major object of enquiry
in linguistics. Other texts, such as grant proposals and internal documents
mentioned in my survey can be ruled out of the corpus because they form
part of the non-public world of Auger’s (1989) ‘grey literature’. Instead of
exact representation of genres in the discourse community therefore, a
rhetorical overview of the department should emerge from a mixture of
authors’ own research articles. These texts are considered to be central to the
researchers’ work, and appear in the journals which the researchers regularly
use for ‘indexical’ purposes in the lab and for general research reading.
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6.2 Design Criteria of the Corpus.

One cause of imbalance in this and perhaps many other corpora lies in the
range of potential criteria for the selection of texts as can be seen below
(from Sinclair 1993c: 6-7):

Medium-oriented choice:
1-Author Texts selected from informants’ own publications.
2-Access Texts chosen on the basis of free access, machine-
readability, etc.

Research-oriented choice:
3-Journal Texts from the same journals as informants’ papers.
4-Prestige Texts from recognised or prestige journals.

Topic-oriented choice:
5-Sample Texts from a wide sample of journals which cover the area
generally.
6-Centrality Texts or journals considered essential by informants.
7-Field Texts covering one research activity or concern only,
perhaps on the basis of bibliography or keywords.
8-Coverage Texts chosen at the level of overview or specialisation.

A combination of these criteria were used to select the texts for the PSC,
although some criteria account for more research articles in the corpus than
others (especially author, prestige and centrality but also access: see below).
Such variables cannot be made entirely distinct. As we saw in the survey of
the Pharmaceutical Sciences Department, the fourteen researchers had
published in their respective fields, and some of their articles provided a
substantial basis for the corpus as a sample of their output. However, their
contributions alone would result in a very heterogeneous body of texts, not
only in terms of different sub-fields as mentioned above, but in the degree of
coverage of the field. For example, one researcher donated an introductory
paper taking a long-term view of his work, in a journal which would have
had a wide readership: Trends in Pharmaceutical Sciences (TPS); whereas
another donated an article in the specialised Tetrahedron Letters (TL) which
was an incomplete part of a series of communications on a specialised drug.
Clearly, the readership of such a paper would be highly limited.
In an attempt to collect a representative spread of research articles, one
might calibrate the papers by criteria such as ‘field’, ‘centrality’ as suggested
above, or by classifying journals by ‘coverage of subject’ (general or
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specific) or ‘size of expected audience’. Another solution would be to use a

measure of prestige. As I mentioned earlier, the department judged its own
research publications according to Impact Factor scores. While papers in
research selectivity exercises are judged according to a researcher’s
publications in high-ranking journals (calculated from citations in other
journals), the head of the department (PL) pointed out that some prestigious
and well known journals were misrepresented in the listings. He pointed out
that the Journal of General Microbiology, a journal subscribed to by the
department and mentioned even by chemists in the survey, does not appear in
the first 600 journals of the Science Citation Index. It was also noted that the
well known high-circulation journal Nature (14th position) was at one point
preceded by the esoteric Advanced Cyclic Nucleic Proteins (8th position) (SCI
1993:83). One explanation of this is that while Nature is a widely distributed
publication, citations in ‘working’ journals, perhaps used more indexically
than for browsing, are likely to make use of more specific data from less
well-known publications. It may therefore be misleading to state that a
corpus represents ‘prestigious journals in the field’, where even an objective
measure attempts to distinguish this. Nevertheless, this rather idiosyncratic
measure does have some importance, since it is valued by the institution and
external funding councils, if not by the individual scientists themselves.
The reputation of journals is also rather difficult to gauge. Tetrahedron
Letters was of doubtful quality according to another researcher (DP), because
it published ‘accelerated’ communications which have not had time to be
tested. Others saw it as an important journal for new research. One way
around this problem was to ask the scientists to cite specifically the last five
papers they had been using as reference material or in the lab and in their
periods of writing up. This ensured that the corpus included a wide range of
journals and topics.

6.3 Choice of Material in the Corpus

The compilation of the PSC involved 150 research articles from a selection of
22 journals. A full list of these articles and the source journal are set out in
Appendix 2. A target of 500 000 words was set as the initial corpus size. In
order to reach this target after the initial collection of papers from the authors
in the survey (which gave 46 papers, criteria 1 and 2, below), a further 104
random papers were selected according to prestige and accessibility (criteria
3 and 4, below). The number of articles collected from each journal was
largely determined by how many papers could be copied a factor limited by
copyright restrictions (usually one paper from each issue was permitted for

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research purposes). But equally crucial were the length of the article and
quality of paper for scanning. The following conditions of inclusion in the
corpus emerged:

1- Authorial: The corpus includes 10 research articles authored or co-

authored by interviewees. One researcher submitted three papers, another two
papers (one in electronic form) and five others submitted one each (one in
electronic form). Four researchers did not donate an article.

2- Centrality: The corpus includes research articles from journals mentioned

in survey question 5b (specific papers the researchers had recently). 36
articles were obtained in this way, mainly from the ADONIS biochemistry
on-line catalogue.

3- Prestige: The corpus includes 80 research articles from journals

mentioned more than twice in survey question 5a (journals the researches
considered important in their field, but which they had not necessarily
consulted recently).

4- Accessibility: The journals FAT, JPP and CAR were available on Medline
and could
be immediately downloaded (abbreviations refer to journal titles listed in
Appendix 2). Article AC was submitted by a researcher from Birmingham
University. This gave 24 articles.

In Appendix 2 the corpus is documented in terms of Journal SCI Rank,

percentage size of the corpus per journal and title of each research article.
The topical and textual breakdown of the texts are detailed in section 6.6.

Choice of Articles and Numbers of Papers.

1. By author: BJ, CC, JCPT[7, 8, 9, 10], JMC, JNCI, TL, TPS

2. By topic centrality: BJC[1-11], CL[1-9], JGM[1-9], JOC[1-7]
3. By prestige: BJP[1-3], BMJ[1-5], CCP[1-16], CR[1-12],
IJC[1-25], JCPT[1-6], JOACS[1-11], PAH[1-2]
4. By accessibility: AC, CAR[1-10], FAT[1-10], JPP[1-3]

It was decided that the PSC would be split into several subcorpora
(pharmacology and cancer – the main division within the pharmaceutical
sciences department) but also into sections including Titles and Abstracts (as
subgenres in the research article) and Introduction, Methods, Results and
Discussion subsections (TAIMRD). Although the original 150 Titles and
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Abstracts of the PSC are compared directly with other rhetorical sections, an
additional subcorpus was deemed to be necessary in order to obtain more
results. This was derived from the electronic index Medline. The PSC-
Medline subcorpus consists of the first 572 abstracts (58 332 running words)
selected by the keyword ‘cancer’ in December 1993. The subcorpus also
includes a separate text of the 572 corresponding Titles (7 626 tokens) for
comparison with the Abstracts. The Abstracts are all author-abstracts, from a
very wide variety of English-language journals and relate to cancer either
from within the Title or Abstract or from the list of keywords included as
Medline data (the keywords are discarded for this study). The Medline corpus
thus has the advantage of topical specificity as well as being a homogenous
source of scientific texts. In the data analysis section, I compare the PSC
titles subcorpus with the PSC as a whole to give a picture of the salient
lexical items which are typical of titles with the PSC. These results can then
be analysed using the Medline corpus, since the PSC titles corpus alone is not
large enough to reveal interesting concordance data.
A number of scanning mistakes due to small print account for certain
anomalies of word counts in my data. In many cases, this meant that some
experimental sections had to be discarded as they often have smaller print
than the rest of the article. The texts that accompany tables were also
eliminated unless they had a considerable amount of argumentation, in which
case they were considered to be valuable parts of the rhetorical section in
which they were situated and added to the end of that section. Once post-
edited, all the texts were converted to text files for use on a PC mounted
UNIX system for frequency tests and then converted to text files for analysis
by a PC wordlist and concordance package (detailed below).
The PSC thus consists of 150 research articles, consisting on average of 7
sections each. Using Roe’s word analysis programs (1993b:10) a UNIX word
frequency count calculates the total word count to be 515 073 running words
(tokens) (Roe takes a word to consist of any string of symbols bound by two
spaces, excluding figures). However, this number of words is probably too
large (some chemical symbols, Greek letters and mis-scans are also identified
by this procedure). A second count by the Wordlist program (Scott 1993)
gave 499 105 words, of which 24 253 were different words (types). The PSC
was then split into sections (including Abstracts) and counted using the
UNIX wordcount (percentages have been adjusted to take account of
overlapping sections such as MR and RD sections):

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Table 1: Size of Corpus by Sections.

Subgenre (Total) Tokens % of PSC.

T-Title (150) 2 123 0.5
A-Abstract (150) 29 283 6.6
I-Introduction (150) 60 809 13.7
M-Methods (125) 113 089 25.5
[MR-Methods/Results (3) 3 207 (32.0)]
[E-Experimental (21) 30 759 (47.0)]
R- Results (120) 123 084 27.8
[RD-Results/Discussion (27) 37 372 (46.1)]
D-Discussion (125) 114 205 25.8
[C-Conclusions (4) 1 022 n/a]
[S-Summary (1) 120 n/a]
Total (TAIMRD only) 442 593 100%
[Total (all sections) 513 931 N/a]

In some journals, hybrid rhetorical sections replace the function of two

separate sections (Methods/Results, Results/Discussion). For example, the
structural chemistry journal JCPT has both RD and E-sections. There are
hybrid rhetorical sections in 30 articles as well as nine non-hybrid articles
which include additional experimental sections. Nine of the 30 RD-sections
are accompanied by experimental sections. Experimental sections occur
almost always in chemical and pharmaceutical papers (with the exception of
TPS). RD-sections occur mostly in cancer research and microbiology papers.
Although these figures suggest they are large sections, they are
proportionally smaller than the corresponding non-hybrid sections when
these are combined. MR and RD sections are usually indicative of an
‘accelerated’ publication or communication, especially in microbiology. The
relative sizes of the rhetorical sections, as well as an element of overlapping
means that statistical comparison between rhetorical sections becomes
complicated. Since Experimental sections never replace Methods sections,
and are roughly equivalent, these are conflated to M-sections (making the
combined section 28.5% of the corpus). It is worth noting here that all
Methods, Methods / Results and Experimental sections are combined for the
purposes of statistical analysis but Results-Discussion sections are kept
separate from the Results and Discussion subcorpora. Results-Discussion
sections are taken into account in the statistics for the whole corpus but are
not the subject of phraseological analysis in this book. It would be for a
future study to determine to what extent phraseology in RD sections is more
or less characteristic of R and D sections separately. For our purposes
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therefore, we look only at the traditional TAIMRD sections, bearing in mind

that an additional control corpus (Medline) is used in conjunction with Titles
and Abstracts.
In terms of impact, coverage and prestige (where the latter term simply
denotes popularity among the expert informants), the SCI index indicates that
some journals in the corpus rate very highly in a list of 8 000 journals, but not
necessarily according to the classification obtained from my survey
(‘prestigious’ journals identified by the expert informants are underlined for
comparison. ‘Prestige’ journals have lower rank score):

Table 2. SCI Impact Ratings of the PSC Journals.

Journal Name SCI Rank (1988) Journal SCI Rank (1988)

BJP 84 CAR 326
AC 93 BJC 340
TPS 94 CC 361
JOACS 113 JCPT 370
CR 132 JOC 394
BJ 152 JMC 397
IJC 226 TL 476
BMJ 232 PAH 516

[JNCI, CCP, CL, FAT, JGM and JPP are not ranked within the first 600]

In terms of relating the PSC with its discourse community, the PSC therefore
includes many high impact journals, and has quite a specialised coverage
with the exception of such ‘introductory’ articles as TPS. It is surprising that
CCP (Cancer Chemotherapy and Pharmacology) is not a ‘very high’ prestige
journal : it was mentioned by researchers from both sides of the department
as a key link between them, as the title of the journal suggests.
Having compiled the PSC, the next stage involves a topical overview of
the specialisms covered in each research article. Two researchers (one from
each main division) helped to classify and gloss all the research articles in the
PSC according to the following research categories:

Oncology (Cancer Research Total=83 articles)

Chemotherapy: 26 Chemico-toxic effects on cancer.

Carcinogenesis: 18 Processes that activate cancer.
Histopathology: 12 Metabolic effects of tumours.
Immunohistochemistry: 11 Organic resistance to tumours.
Cytogenetics: 10 Genetic characteristics of cancer.
Cancer Epidemiology: 2 Population study of carcinogenesis.
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Radioimmunology: 2 Radio-toxic effects on tumours.

Histology: 1 Organic properties of tumours.
Immunology: 1 Organic resistance to tumours.

Pharmaceutical science (Medicinal Chemistry Total=63)

Structural chemistry: 18 Processes of chemical interaction.

Organic Chemistry:15 Functions of organic compounds.
Toxicology: 13 Effects of drugs on metabolism.
Pharmacology: 9 Effect of drugs on disease.
Enzymology: 8 Organic compounds in the metabolism.

General Medicine (Total=4)

Epidemiology: 1 Population study of disease.

Gynaecology: 1 Population study of fertility.
Patient Care: 1 Hospital management of disease.
Virology: 1 Population study of rubella virus.

The corpus emerges with a large number of papers on the biology of cancer
(55% of the PSC), covering a range of probably the most important cancer
specialisms, from descriptions of the problem to testing biochemical
solutions to the problem (chemotherapy and immunohistochemistry), the
latter forming the larger part of the cancer research division. The minority
part of the corpus, pharmaceutical sciences (42%) is more diverse, covering
more specialisms than is perhaps suggested by the term ‘structural
chemistry’. As can be seen in Appendix A some journals are topic-specific
being mostly pharmaceutical and low impact (BJP, CCP, FAT, JCPT,
JOACS, JOC, JPP, PAH) while others have a range of specialisms (BMJ,
BJC, CAR, CL, CR, IJC, JGM) and tend to be high impact cancer research /
microbiology journals. The British Journal of Medicine was one of the most
favoured journals, (more than five mentions). Unfortunately, no examples of
BMJ papers on cancer were available, so five random papers were included
as examples of the genre.

6.4 Corpus Typology

Knowing that your corpus is unbalanced is what counts. (Atkins et al. 1992:14)

As well as considering the internal linguistic features of the corpus, it is

necessary to set out systematically the external contextual characteristics of
the texts as a whole. As I have already mentioned, one of the more interesting
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aspects of corpus design is not an attempt to provide total coverage or

representativeness, but the realisation that the texts of even such a specialised
corpus are different and distinct. No two corpora can be exactly comparable.
With this complexity in mind, Atkins, Clear and Ostler (1992:15-19) set out a
taxonomy of corpora for the description of their International Corpus of
English on the basis of Enkvist’s (1989) concept of textual ‘context’ in
corpus linguistics. They propose a typological template to establish the
various features of any corpus. In their terms, the PSC can be characterised as
follows:

• PSC function is ‘informative, persuasive’ rather than ‘instructional’.

• PSC setting is based on a ‘scientific research’ setting, including laboratory
and institutional use.
• PSC style is ‘academic scientific’ and presumably varies according to
internal factors such as ‘technicality’ (degree of specialisation).
• PSC technicality is ‘high degree of specialist/technical knowledge of the
author and target readership/audience’.
• PSC topic is a complex of ‘science, biology, chemistry etc.’
• PSC genre is ‘research article in the pharmaceutical sciences’ but because
of varying reader motivations (browsing, reference indexing) and of
variations in format and text type (communications, quasi-reports,
experimental reports, introductory essays) the term ‘research article’ covers
a wider range of texts than originally conceived. I propose the informal term
co-genre for these, and subgenre for such sections as ‘Titles’,
‘Introductions’ etc.

It is difficult to establish the other criteria proposed by Atkins et al.. For

example, the ‘authority’ of each text is only known for the texts originating
from the survey. Despite the large number of multi-author texts, there is no
evidence to suggest that single authorship is indicative of coverage or
authority: single-author papers AC and TL are very specific and written by
post-doctoral research fellows, CC is a specialist single author text by a
senior lecturer, and TPS is a more general text by a professor who also
happens to be an editor of other journals. The other factors cited by Atkins et
al. can not be easily identified for this corpus. For example, I have no record
of the degree of proficiency in English of many of my authors, although
many of the co-authored texts appear to be written by scientists from non-
English speaking counties.
It is possible of course to analyse any number of these different
dimensions from the point of view of phraseology (the phraseology of
genetics articles versus structural chemistry, of single-author versus multiple-
author texts, or native-author versus non-native author texts etc.). Although
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such analysis would be of benefit to the genre analysis of the research article,
the rhetorical sub-section of the article remains the main focus of analysis in
this book and should serve as a model for future analysis of other dimensions.

6.5 Text Analysis

In this section, I set out the main analytical procedures involved in my

analysis of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus. The statistical analysis of
the PSC follows the following plan:

1. Frequency: the corpus is split into sub-sections (or ‘sub-genres’) and

wordlists are prepared for each section.
2. Saliency: The Wordlist program compares each sub-list with the overall
PSC. The most statistically significant grammatical items are selected as
typical of each different PSC sub-section.
3. Concordance: The Microconcord program is used to establish the
collocational patterns of each salient grammatical item. A phraseology for
each sub-section can then be established.

The procedure used to prepare and compile the PSC is similar to that used in
the compilation of the Cobuild dictionary (as set out by Krishnamurthy 1987,
Clear 1987 and Sinclair 1991) and has been broken down into a series of
computational steps by Roe (1993a:10-13) on a UNIX-based system called
the ASTEC suite and later developed for the WINDOWS environment as the
Aston Text Analyser (ATA). Burnard (1992:21) describes UNIX in terms of
libraries of routines used for common procedures that can be integrated into a
common environment. While this makes the ASTEC analysis extremely
flexible, commercially available programs emphasise the presentation of data
which is an important consideration in concordance analysis. Further steps in
the analysis as well as comparison of the rhetorical sections were thus carried
out at a later stage by an PC-based collocation program (Microconcord:
Johns and Scott 1993) and the wordlist compiler (Wordlist: Scott 1993). The
differences in definitions of what is an acceptable and unacceptable ‘word’ in
these programs, and textual changes of format in converting the PSC for
these systems mean that consequent differences in word frequency lists must
be taken into account.

STAGE 1: ANALYSING FREQUENCY. The main justification for using

frequency lists in this book is the capacity of the computer to identify
statistically the most salient lexical differences between two texts or corpora.
We can demonstrate this by preparing a sample comparison of most frequent

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words in the PSC with the 17 million word Cobuild corpus (these figures
differ slightly from the Wordlist generated list in Appendix 1). This is
calculated by the ASTEC program by simply comparing two frequency lists
as follows:

Table 3: The Astec top ten lexical items in the PSC and Cobuild corpora.

Rank Item Tokens PSC % Cobuild

%.
1 the 29 122 5.8 6.1
2 of 21 309 4.3 3.0
3 and 14 610 2.9 2.8
4 in 14 349 2.8 1.8
5 a 8 631 1.7 2.4
6 to 8 125 1.7 2.7
7 was 6 146 1.2 1.0
8 with 3 543 1.1 0.6
9 for 5 224 1.0 0.8
10 were 5 162 1.0 0.4

The ASTEC comparison reveals clear differences between the specialist and
the general corpora, especially in the sharp increase in the proportion of
many prepositions in the PSC (this increase can be more clearly seen in the
first 100 words of the PSC in Appendix 1). It is also notable that the
conjunction / pronoun that at rank 7 in the general language corpus drops to
rank 12 in the PSC (with 3 359 occurrences) and the pronoun it at rank 8 in
Cobuild drops down to rank 41 in PSC (with 1 006 occurrences).
As part of ASTEC, the ‘COMMON’ program produced a list in
descending order of relative frequency of each item in the PSC and a figure
indicating the relative frequency in the Cobuild list. A clear pattern emerges
from this analysis: clumps of words are very significantly associated with the
PSC in the mid-range level of frequency as one would expect (between,
human, table, using, results, both, study, shown, protein, observed, DNA,
data are all at 0.4% or more compared to their occurrence in Cobuild: 0.14%
or less). Other higher frequency words have a slightly higher relative
frequency in the PSC: of, and, in, was, with, for, were, by, cells, at, from, or,
et al., these, after, also, mice, activity (all at 0.7% frequency or more in the
PSC). Conversely, several grammatical items have a significantly higher
percentage frequency in Cobuild than in the PSC: the, a, to, that, is, as, on,
this, are, be, not, which, an, have, it, all, has, but, other.

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Even a cursory glance at these lists suggests considerable differences of

grammatical and phraseological patterning between scientific texts and a
general language corpus. A number of these differences are examined in
more detail below.

STAGE 2: DETERMINING SALIENT WORDS. A salient word is a word that

occurs significantly more in one text (or part of a text) than it does in another.
Using the Wordlist program, ten of the most statistically salient grammatical
items from each subcorpus were identified in order to examine their
collocational properties and phraseology.
The Wordlist program create frequency lists and compares them. The
resultant ‘keyword’ list places those words that are more frequent in the text
type at the top, and words that are untypical of that text towards the bottom of
the list. The first step in saliency analysis involves the Wordlist program
which compares proportional frequency lists made for each rhetorical section
of the corpus, weighing the frequency of words in each list against the
proportion of the corpus made up by the subgenre. Wordlist then compares
the word frequency list of each section with the whole corpus (or part of the
corpus if comparing R- and D-sections) providing a chi-square score of
significant difference (as described by 1985a and Barnbrook 1996). This is
obtained by dividing the observed frequency of the word in the sublist by the
observed frequency in the whole PSC and multiplying by the expected
frequency, a proportion based on the size of the subcorpus relative to the
whole PSC. Wordlist then prepares a list of salient words for that rhetorical
section. The results of the most statistically significant salient words for each
rhetorical section are listed in Appendices 3-8. I have only listed the first 50
items from each result: a Wordlist comparison assesses every word including
all the words that are non-significant. Unfortunately, these lists are too long
to be included in the Appendices.
To demonstrate the use of these saliency lists, here is an extract from the
list of salient items in Abstracts:

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Table 4: Wordlist : Abstract-salient words in the PSC.

PSC

Rank Word Freq. % Freq. % (%) Chi2 Proba

in in in in bility
Abstracts Abstracts PSC PSC
31 but 67 (0.2%) 663 (0.1%) 18.1 0.00
0
32 immortalized 13 (0.0%) 69 (0.0%) 17.9
33 showed 43 (0.1%) 375 (0.0%) 17.4 0.00
0
34 increased 43 (0.1%) 376 (0.0%) 17.2 0.00
0
35 interval 12 (0.0%) 56 (0.0%) 16.9

Items at the top of the word list are relatively more frequent than those near
the bottom. This represents the first page of several, so all of these words are
particularly ‘salient’ or typical of Abstracts. Near the bottom of the list in
Appendix 4, it can be seen that immortalized is the 32nd most Abstract-
salient word (by virtue of its observed frequency in the Abstract, i.e. 13
tokens). This result is divided by the observed frequency of the word in the
PSC (69 tokens). Its occurrence is not judged by the program to be significant
(the chi-square is calculated as 17.9 but a p score is not shown). In fact, from
the Wordlist tables it can be seen that there is a statistical cut-off point in
terms of items that are too ‘infrequent’ compared to items from the whole
corpus. For Abstracts the cut-off point is 90. This means that while items
with fewer than 90 occurrences in the PSC may be very frequent in Abstracts
(i.e. ‘salient’), they are not given a p-score.
On the other hand, but is the 31st most abstract-salient word, the first
grammatical item on the list and has a chi-square score of 18.1, which at 1
degree of difference (Butler 1985a:176) places it even below the 0.1% level.
This is considered to be ‘highly significant’ (5% or less is regarded as
‘significant’) and those items with a p = 0.000 score in the lists are all
considered statistically very highly significant. Wordlist signals words that
are important to the corpus as a whole by showing their percentage if it is
greater than 0.1% (in the case of but 0.2%). As a statistically salient word as
well as a grammatical item, but therefore merits out attention. This word is

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then listed as the 1st Abstract-salient item in Appendix 4 (followed by these

and of and the other salient grammatical items from Abstracts).
As internal measurements of the relative distribution of words in the
corpus, the Wordlist results serve as the basis for deciding which items are of
interest in our analysis. The assumption here is that a significantly frequent
item is likely to play some role in a phraseological pattern. The assumption is
also that the significance of an item in one part of the corpus may be typical
of that rhetorical section, although clearly an analysis of the use of the word
would need to be undertaken across the corpus to rule out overgeneralisation.
In theory, a word may have a constant distribution but a different
phraseological pattern throughout the corpus. For this reason, those items
which have been found to be salient in different sections are analysed in
sequence in order to demonstrate any similarities or differences in behaviour.
It is important to note here that chi-squared has recently been criticised for
some samples (Clear 1993, Kilgariff 1996) because it compares texts with an
idealised notion of general distribution. Kilgariff’s observations suggest that
two versions of a British English corpus show more variance under chi-
square than when American and British corpora are compared. His argument
is perfectly reasonable: since no two isolated sentences will share the same
distribution of grammatical items, there should be no surprise that high
frequency words do in fact vary even within what is supposed to be a
homogenous corpus. My argument would be that similar genres have similar
grammatical profiles, and that Nevertheless, it should be clear from the
Appendices 3-8 that the items identified as salient are indeed very highly
significantly more frequent in different subsections of the corpus that one
would normally expect in a general distribution (or at least some items are
salient in a number of sections, indicating that they are very untypical in
others). The ultimate test is that the phraseology which emerges should
conform in some respects to previous research which has examined
differences in research article subsections, and I signal these instances as
necessary in the analysis below.
The subcorpora-salient words that emerge from the Wordlist analysis are
set out in section IV (data analysis). The rationale for choosing the first ten
grammatical items rather than just the first ten salient items in a subcorpus
has been discussed above. The main argument is that grammatical items have
been relatively neglected in traditional analyses of phraseology, although
recent corpus research has emphasised their role in grammatical collocation
and collocational frameworks (Gerson 1989). I hope to demonstrate
throughout section IV below that grammatical items have very distinctive
collocational properties. The significance of grammatical phraseology can be
simply illustrated here by fact that the grammatical item but identified above

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is more likely to be of interest to a discussion of the phraseology of Abstracts

than the word Summary which is the most salient item in the list, but which is
clearly also expected to occur at the head of the Abstract or Summary
section! In any case, grammatical items such as but tend to be the most
salient items in the list (this can be seen in the results for the main sections of
the article: Appendices 5-8, although admittedly the results for grammatical
items are less striking for the shorter Titles and Abstracts). Nevertheless,
many lexical items are also important indicators of phraseology, and I raise
any interesting tendencies when I discuss each individual section in Chapter
Three. The importance placed on grammatical items here should however
not detract from the initial assumptions I have argued throughout this book,
that lexical and grammatical items ultimately operate on a continuum.

Some initial results are worth mentioning at this point. The following
grammatical items were identified by Wordlist as salient words in the
different parts of the corpus (I indicate by code the original subcorpus of each
item. Some items, like ‘both’ or ‘this’ are listed by their most frequent word
class as observed in the corpus):

Auxiliary / Modal verbs (11): was (A, M), did (A, R). been (I), has (I),
have (I, D), is (I, D), can (I), were (M), had
(R), be (D), may (D).
Prepositions (11): of (T, A, I), for (T, M), on (T), in (T, A,
R, D), to (I), at (M), from (M), after (M, R)
Determiners (8): these (A), such (I), each (M), no (R), the
(R), all (R), our (D), this (D)
Conjunctions (5): and (T, M), but (A), that (A, D), both (A),
when (R)
Pronouns (4): there (A, R), who (A), it (I), we (I, D),
Grammatical Adverbs (2): then (M), not (R, D)

The analysis covers 38 items in total, and certain items are salient in a
number of different sections of the research article. As mentioned above, this
allows for an analysis of phraseological distribution across the corpus: the
behaviour of in for example, can be analysed in Titles, Abstracts and Results
and Discussion sections. The salience of in in these sections can be regarded
as a result of its relative infrequency of use elsewhere (in Methods and
Introductions). Below I set out the analysis in two different ways: by
grammatical item (thus examining the changing phraseology of one item

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throughout the corpus) and by rhetorical section (establishing a specific

phraseology for each sub-section).

STAGE 3: CONCORDANCE ANALYSIS. The first step in recognising patterns

in the corpus is to create a computer-readable index of the location of every
word in the text, a process that is fully automatic in most concordancing
packages.. Patterns of use are made easier to see by placing each instance of a
word and its context in the centre of the computer screen (the ‘concordance’)
and changing the list format so that words to the left or the right are presented
together and alphabetically. In Microconcord, patterns can be calculated
statistically (for left, right and total collocates of a word) and the patterns can
also be outlined in colour, highlighting patterns over a long range and
permitting the analysis and sorting of collocational frameworks (Renouf and
Sinclair 1991). Here is an example of an ordered concordance of the word of
elicited from the Medline corpus where the left hand pattern was revealed
first; then an ordered listing is elicited for one word to the right:

1 Table 5: Selection from an ordered concordance of of

Anesthetic... management of a patient with Bartter’s syndrome.

neurosurgical... management of brain {metastasis} from colorectal
Psychological... management of breast cancer patients in a group.
ort review. 371 Management of chemotherapy-induced neutropenic
Teicoplanin in the Management of Febrile Episodes in Neutropenic
Ch resistance in the management of head and neck cancer.
current trends in the management of invasive bladder cancer.
current trends in the management of localised prostate cancer.
irradiation in the management of patients with liver {metastases}:
{interdisciplinary} management of ...retinoblastoma.
Diagnosis and management of salivary dysfunction.

From this we can gather that the expression ...management of... is an

important way of introducing the concept of a specific treatment of disease in
the title (at least in cancer research). I have imposed a notational convention
on the concordances presented in this book as follows:

Bold item a node word or word currently under

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investigation.
Underlined item a highly frequent collocate of the node word.
{Item in curly brackets} a cluster of semantically related lexical
items.
<Items in angled brackets> a fixed sequence of collocates.

We can see from the example concordances that the fixed sequence <in the
management of> is not just a phrase in itself but is related to a broader
phraseology. This is because it collocates with a consistent set of topical
patterns with few deviations from the pattern. For example, the expression is
introduced by a general statement of research, in particular the collocations
current trends in, diagnosis and... or a less fixed and more varied semantic
set (clinical histochemical approaches: {Treicoplanin in, irradiation in,
resistance in...}). However, the word management on its own has a different
phraseology. It allows the researcher to signal the general methodology to be
undertaken in the rest of the article: {anesthetic, neurosurgical,
psychological, interdisciplinary}. Similar modification of the type of cancer
is also involved to the right of the expression and these could be said to be
typical processes of inclusion of methodology and precision of problem in
the noun phrases of titles.
The advantage of this kind of visual analysis is that it reveals patterns that
may not easily be revealed by automatically derived collocation counts.
Having identified a pattern such as management of, it can be seen that the
expression is semantically modified by a topic that is only intuitively
accessible: a statement of the disease or its symptoms (Y cancer, Y patients).
The visual cues are not used in all cases, but it can be immediately gathered
from the above example that the term management involves two consistent
phraseologies.
In order to signal where a reading of the concordance has revealed a large
scale lexical pattern, a semantic covering term is expressed in brackets and in
small capitals {DISEASE Y}. In the phraseological analysis section of the book I
have identified four major semantic categories: RESEARCH, CLINICAL, EMPIRICAL
and BIOCHEMICAL, with certain further subcategories. I have also used the
symbol X to demonstrate the many types of treatment-related names of
compounds (often with positive connotations), and Y for many disease-related
items. Finally, in order to make the optimum use of examples, a maximum of
five concordance lines is usually shown for each pattern.

STAGE 4: CALCULATING COLLOCATION. For my purposes, collocation is a

statistical phenomenon of language that can be used to justify the
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identification of patterns by the analysis of concordances of a specific

context. For example, in the Medline control corpus, management was found
to be not only a frequent but also a significant collocate of of. ‘Of’ itself was
a significant word in titles when compared with the rest of the corpus. Thus
the justification of analysis of the initial node of and hence expressions in
which it plays a role, are based on some comparison with a norm. The term
‘statistical collocation’ is thus seen as the justification for the assignment of
phraseological patterns. The term ‘phraseological collocation’ is used here to
signify patterns that are not significant or even frequent by themselves but are
visibly (or intuitively) part of the phraseology, such as the pattern { EMPIRICAL
PROCESS} in the management of + {DISEASE Y}.
A built-in assumption of statistical collocation (as opposed to
phraseological collocation) is that the closer collocates are to their nodes, the
greater the collocational force between them. This has led to dispute over the
amount of co-text (the span to the left or right of a node) that should be taken
into account, on the grounds that, as Sinclair argued, collocates are not
independent variables. If so, there should be some systematic approach to
determining statistical dependence. Generally, phraseological studies either
treat collocation as directional (either left of or right of the node) or
informational (collocates are calculated for both sides). They also vary in the
value they assign to the position of the collocate. Thus a different value can
be either assigned locally for each position of each collocate: first left, second
left, first right, second right and so on, or assigned globally to a collocate
regardless of position or span. Different collocation programs provide a range
of means of calculating frequency of collocation (to a span of ten) and
position of collocation (to a span of three):

1. Microconcord: Short range (3 x 3) globalised collocation (either

informational or directional)
2. Astec: Short range (3 x 3) localised collocation (directional only)
3. Wordlist: Long range (10 x 10) globalised collocation (either
informational or directional)

Each of the programs has statistical and analytical advantages and

drawbacks. Astec’s SYN program calculates collocations for all items to the
left of the node and the right of the node separately for a span of 3 x 3. Thus
the first line for of from the PSC is:

the (174) a (134) the (574) of the (354) of (67) a (34)

This is useful for determining distribution according to position, but does not
give an immediate pattern that can be followed up by closer analysis by
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concordance. Microconcord, on the other hand, gives equal value to

collocates up to a span of 3 x 3. Thus, in the PSC Medline corpus, the first
three left collocates of of are the (100), and (59) and cancer (41) while right
collocates are the (78) cancer (69) and in (63). The program gives at the
same time a view of the main concordance and the full co-text, allowing an
immediate overview of phraseological patterns in which a word may be
involved. Wordlist calculates global collocation to a wider span of 10 x 10.
The results are more dispersed than those of Microconcord, as shown below:

Table 6: Collocates of ‘of’ in a 10 x 10 span, according to the

Wordlist program.

Collocate Frequency of Frequency of

left right
collocation. collocation.
of 1421 1451
cancer 1203 1295
in 1208 1251
the 1156 1116
a 492 447
with 376 392
breast 279 328
for 359 229
patients 254 258
cell 259 231
human 175 259

This shows that patterns appear to be established even across such a wide
span (of + breast, of + human). The program also allows for a distribution
analysis not across several texts but within a text, giving a ‘bar code’ of the
co-occurrence of up to three items. In his own collocation program, Clear
(1993) takes a window of 5 words i.e. a span of 2 x 2 (two words to the left
of a node, the node itself, two words to the right of a node) and does not take
into account whether items are left or right collocates: they are all calculated
together. Clear uses two principles of information retrieval from corpora.
Precision is the measure of how successfully the system retrieves interesting
data. Recall is a measure of how much interesting data are actually found and
how much are lost. Phillips (1985) and Smadja (1993a) aim at a total
collocational description of a corpus, and thus recall is an important concept
for them. For the purposes of this book, however, precision is a sufficient
measure of the significance of what Clear terms mutual information.

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Atkins, Calzolari and Picchi (1992) define mutual information for

collocation as the logarithm (to base 2) of the observed co-occurrence of a
collocate with a node divided by the independent probability of either
meeting by chance within the corpus. The result is squared to give a steadily
increasing logarithmic MI score, where the highest scoring items are
considered the most ‘collocational’. The following table illustrates the fact
that highly mutually informational collocates do not correspond to the most
frequent collocates (here the collocations are derived from Microconcord):

Table 7: Mutual information (MI) of collocates of the word of from the

Medline titles subcorpus.

Collocate Corpus Frequency MI score.

Rank of 2
collocation. Log P(Obs/Exp)
presentation + of 10 7 8.4
department + of 17 10 8.0
concentration + of 34 17 7.6
majority + of 13 6 7.4
significance + of 24 10 7.2
died + of 28 10 6.8
management + of 43 15 6.8
[ ... ]
of + patients 11 24 2.0
of + of 2 85 1.7
of + was 9 16 1.4

The MI score also reveals different patterns: it is only until the last half of the
MI table for of (see the Analysis section 11.1 and Appendix C for full details)
that right-hand collocates appear, suggesting that the use of of is largely
motivated by a limited set of left-hand research-activity or empirically
oriented words like presentation, department, majority, measurement which
are then qualified by a more diverse group of disease-related items (disease
Y, cancer X, patient...). This example illustrates the fact that frequency and
significance only tell half the story: there may be collocational patterns to be
discerned in the less statistically salient parts of the table.
For a number of reasons the MI score was not used in the main analysis of
this book. To begin with, I examined fifty collocations of of to obtain the
above table. If ten items from each rhetorical section were analysed, I would
have to calculate a large number of collocates for each of the 38 items: that
means 1900 (38 x 50) two-word combinations. Since I am interested in
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longer collocational patterns than 2 words, such an analysis would not be

mathematically accurate. This is the reasoning behind Howarth’s reticence
over automatic identification of phrasemes (1996). Another problem with
collocational counts is that some items are significant yet have few short-
range collocational properties (such as the statistically significant use of but
in the abstract). Kaye (1990) suggests that sampling be carried out over a
large amount of text to include discussion of long-range collocation such as
so ... as. In a relatively small corpus such as the PSC, however, most of the
occurrences of an item such as of can be analysed, since the highest
frequency items in the corpus display remarkably stable collocational
properties.
To summarise: collocational patterns are identified firstly in terms of raw
frequency in this book within a span of 3 x 3 while more diverse patterns are
established by concordance analysis. No automatic method (such as the MI
score) is applied. Statistical collocations (signalled here by underlining) are
therefore a measure of rank occurrence within the span of the node word, but
no statistical significance is claimed for phraseological patterns as a whole
(in particular involving semantically-related items).

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IV. Collocations and the Research Article

The context and specificity of the research article genre have been explored
in the introductory sections of this book. A theory of text has been proposed
in which collocations and phraseology are seen as central to the discourse of
science. In order to examine the research article genre more systematically,
the construction of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus (PSC) was described
in section III. In this section, I examine the specific phraseological and
collocational properties of the corpus with a view to exploring the typical
style of scientific texts.
The description throughout the following sections attempts to answer a
basic hypothesis about the research article: collocational patterns are assumed
to correspond to rhetorical functions, and are also considered to be consistent
within different sections of the cancer research article (the so-called
rhetorical sections: Title, Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results and
Discussion). In order to examine this specific claim, I set out firstly a
separate analysis of those grammatical items of statistical significance in
different research article sections (at times this extends to four sections per
item). On the basis of the remaining grammatical items (those which are only
salient in one specific section), I then examine the particular phraseology of
each rhetorical section in turn.

1. Collocations of Salient Words in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus

As explained in section III.6, a Wordlist analysis of all the words in a section

of the corpus provides us with a systematic comparison of the section and the
corpus as a whole. The most statistically significant items are termed salient
words (as listed in Appendices 3-8), and these items can be sorted according
to three criteria:

1. significant lexical items.

2. significant items of high frequency in the PSC.
3. significant grammatical items.

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In my discussion of data collection above, I argued that grammatical items

give the optimum amount of phraseological information for a medium-to-
small sized corpus such as the PSC. As we have seen, statistically the PSC is
too small to provide interesting phraseological data for low frequency items
(criterion 1) and in such cases Wordlist imposes a statistically-determined
cut-off for each section (those items which do not obtain a p=000 score). It
can be seen that many such criterion-1 items are very specific lexical items or
hapax legomena (accidents or very or unique forms such as B6C3F1 in the
Title-salient list). Criterion 2 on the other hand provides an immense amount
of valid data, as can be seen in the results for Titles and Abstracts
(Appendices 3 and 4). My argument for criterion 3 simply rests on the
assumption that an analysis of phraseology from the basis of grammatical
items minimises the amount of data analysis needed by characterising global
patterns first. I maintain that the kind of data obtained under criterion 2
would be more suitable for a lexicographic or terminological survey than a
phraseological one. As we have seen, few phraseological studies have
concentrated on grammatical items (criterion 3) because the amounts of data
to be analysed are too large. Ironically, these studies are also often too large
to provide insights about specific text-types. And it has been shown in our
discussion of the lexico-grammar that many phraseological units contain at
least one grammatical item. In other words, if grammatical items are analysed
as a priority over and above criterion 2 items, then it follows that lexical
items of interest should emerge as organising elements within a larger
phraseology. In most cases, as can be seen in Appendices 5-8, grammatical
items are more frequent in any case, and it is likely that any patterns they
display will be more statistically significant than those of lower frequency
lexical items.
As detailed in section III.6 above, salient words are selected from each
rhetorical section because they are statistically atypical of the rest of the
corpus. They are therefore an internal measure, typical of the rhetorical
section rather than of the corpus as a whole. The salient grammatical items
for the six main rhetorical sections in the corpus are listed in the table below.
For comparative purposes, salient words which enjoy a higher rank in the
PSC than in the Cobuild corpus are underlined. (Statistics for each section are
provided later. Only five grammatical items are salient in Titles):

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Table 8. Salient Grammatical Words in Rhetorical Sections of the PSC.

Titles Abstracts Introductions Methods Results Discussion

1 of but been were no that
2 for these has was in be
3 on of have at did may
4 and there is then not is
5 in in such for had our
6 - was can each after in
7 - that it and there not
8 - did we from the this
9 - who of after when we
10 - both to with all have

It can be seen that some sections are more ‘Cobuild-like’ than others.
Paradoxically, 35 of the 55 words set out in the table above are in fact
relatively more frequent in the Cobuild 1987 corpus than in the PSC (as
detailed in section 2.6 above). Patterns attributed to Cobuild items may
represent a ‘general language’ quality of that rhetorical section, although as
we demonstrate below, their use in fact changes significantly in the corpus.
Perhaps not surprisingly however, Introduction and Discussion sections have
a more ‘general language’ vocabulary, while the salient items in Titles and
Abstracts seem to be further away from general usage. Salient words that are
more frequent in the corpus (in Titles and Abstracts) presumably have
phraseological patterns which move the corpus as a whole away from the
general language. This sense of distance is of course a convenient metaphor:
the real difference lies in the high density of use of such items as prepositions
in these sections. Such features of language are noted in the analyses set out
below. In summary, when grammatical items are analysed in the corpus, we
are characterising a particularity of the rhetorical section that sets it apart
from other sections, not necessarily one that sets the corpus apart from
Cobuild or the general language. Some words, such as ‘between’ have a
higher rank in the PSC but are relatively stable across the corpus: they are
therefore not covered this kind of analysis.
In the following sections, I have set out grammatical items which are
salient in several sections in alphabetical order in order to immediately
compare the behaviour of an item from one section to the next (such as is
which is salient in Introduction and Discussion sections). Secondly, certain
items are very highly significant for that rhetorical section only, and can be
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more usefully described in a general discussion of each section as a whole.

The following tables indicate the order in which I have conducted these two
analyses:

Table 9: Repeated Salient Words Sorted by Item

Titles Abstracts Introduction Methods Results Discussion

after * *
and * *
did * *
for * *
have * *
in * * * *
is * *
not * *
of * * *
that * *
there * *
was * *
we * *

Table 10: Unique Salient Words Sorted by Section

Title Abstract Introduction Methods Results Discussion

on but been were no be
these has at had may
who such then the our
both can each when this
it from all
to with

Each one of these items is analysed as a node word below, thus has and have
are analysed separately (it is worth noting here that each word form has a
sufficiently different set of collocates to justify this separation, a point
defended in our discussion of the lexico-grammar, above). These salient
words are analysed below with the data that motivate their selection (these
figures can also be seen in the Appendices). I have attempted to limit the
number of examples of collocation to five, although there is some variation in
this. With long examples I have sometimes had to omit all other elements
except the heads of complex nominals or omit modifying words which did
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not fit into the span (for example, a long set of technical pre-modifiers placed
before a significant collocate of the node word).
One specific finding which emerges from the corpus needs to be signalled
here before I set out the data in full. There is a strong tendency for
collocations to cluster around lexical items that share similar semantic
characteristics. Four process types appear to predominate in the corpus data.
They are listed here from relative proximity to the scientists (research
processes) to relative distance (biochemical processes):

a) RESEARCH (cognitive, verbal processes) or ‘metacomments’ about research

itself, and which characterise the writing activity or act of observation that the
researchers are engaged in (for example, from the Medline corpus: study,
evaluation, case, comparison, analysis, detection, characterisation, assessment).

b) CLINICAL (material, behavioural processes) include the medical or

methodological processes carried out specifically by the scientists in
experimentation: (e.g. treatment, therapy, care, management, resection, injection).

c) EMPIRICAL (relational, material, perceptual processes) refer to theoretical

models or express quantitative observations and the behaviour of data (effect, role,
risk, influence, use, relevance, stability, increase).

d) BIOCHEMICAL (material, behavioural processes) identify the technical

biochemical interactions and entities observed by the researchers: (expression,
infusion, synthesis, hydrolysis, induction).

I find below that so called ‘regular’ phraseological units typically restrict the
semantic components of the phrase to one of these process types (or even a
subtype). In other words, one of the defining characteristics of each process
type is that they occur in complementary distribution to each other. This is in
effect the principle behind the original Cobuild dictionary: senses are defined
by collocational or even grammatical behaviour. I use this classification to
describe the global characteristics of a phrase but emphasise here that these
categories emerged initially from the corpus analysis and need to be
considered in their phraseological environment.
It should also be noted here that I make reference to clause structure often
in terms of Hallidayan grammar (1985), including terms such as relational
(copular) clauses and material (transitive) clauses, adjuncts (sentence
modifiers) etc. The scientific processes: biochemical, clinical, empirical or
research also closely relate to Halliday’s transitivity processes (material,
relational, verbal, mental, behavioural...). For example, most research
processes correspond semantically (if not phraseologically) with Halliday’s
mental or verbal processes.
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2.The Phraseology of Salient Items

In this section I set out alphabetically those grammatical items which are
salient in more than one research article section. Their relative rank of
salience in relation to the Wordlist comparison is included in brackets.

2.1 AFTER1 (Methods salient word 9).

We have seen above that in a general lexical comparison between the PSC
and the Cobuild corpus, prepositions emerge as the most significantly
frequent items in science writing, whereas auxiliaries and modal verbs,
conjunctions, pronouns and determiners appear to be less prevalent. This
suggests that the research article genre differs from the general language at a
basic grammatical level in nominal groups (in which prepositions play a key
role), phrasal / prepositional verb usage and the use of sentence adjuncts. The
phraseology of ‘after’ is important in Methods sections in the expression of
time. The preposition does not however head a time-related PP (preposition
phrase), but instead introduces a clinical process performed before the action
indicated by the verb. The methodological procedure is thus presented in
reverse order in the sentence. Some typical examples include:

{Clinical process} after {Clinical nominalisation}

were added 24 hours after amputation
were killed 26-30 days after injection
cultures grown 3 hours after the start of chemotherapy
regimes administered several hours after heating at reflux
l-action was applied for 2 hours after drug administration

After tends to be introduced by passivised clinical or experimental

interventions such as obtained, added, killed (its 3 most frequent lexical left
collocates). This is markedly different to its use in the general language,
where after more frequently introduces a time expression in narrative
(according to Cobuild the most frequent uses include after two days, after a
while: these are more frequent, but of course the preposition enters into many
other patterns). Furthermore, we can see that alternative time expressions in
the PSC take on a rather different phraseology. For example, if a specific

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time reference is missing in the left-hand expression, after is usually

intensified by ‘immediately’:

removed immediately after sacrifice

returned to their cages immediately after surgery
saline was removed immediately after surgery
excised immediately after exposure
cut into two parts immediately after the cyclophophanine
infusion

These expressions also provide numerous euphemisms for killing

experimental animals (as in the example after sacrifice). Various
euphemisms of this sort emerge in our corpus data below.

AFTER2 (Results salient word 6).

In Results sections, after is used predominantly in the phrase <after

treatment> (more than 50 occurrences). Apart from time periods, observed is
the most frequent left-collocate, and in many examples after takes on its
more usual general language function introducing time phrases:

the resistant phenotype observed after 10 min. dilution time

the phenotype was observed after 2 days cultivation
the resistance was observed after 4 weeks of treatment

This might be taken as a small move in the direction of general language

style. The lexical phrase <after adjustment for> also becomes prevalent in
Results sections and is used sentence-initially (in the terminology of theme-
rheme analysis) in a complex topical theme. As I point out in my specific
discussion of Results sections below, much of the recurrent phraseology of
this section has to do with rephrasing. In this case, the expression
reformulates a variable and passes over or summarises a complex set of
calculations:

<After adjustment for> other factors, we

<After adjustment for> birth weight
<After adjustment for> this additional variation
<After adjustment for> tumor stage
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<After adjustment for> the same factors

2.2 AND1 (Title salient word 4).

Conjunctions are perhaps the least likely candidates to display collocational

properties. Yet and appears in a number of relatively predictable
collocational frameworks throughout the corpus, for example: combined
{research process / clinical process} and (research process / clinical process},
where the word combined appears to function in Titles as an additional
intensifier:

combined presentation and discussion.

combined chemotherapy and evaluation.
combined evaluation and comparison.
combined diagnosis and management.
combined modality advance radiation in children and radiotherapy.

Since and is a salient word in Titles, it presumably has a significant role in

the presentation of data. While and is treated in general language as a
conjunction signalling similarity or connectedness in longer stretches of
discourse, in research article Titles it is primarily used to signal causality. In
other words, the conjunction joins items that may be construed to be worthy
of scientific enquiry and has the pattern: {disease related cause} and
{disease}:

diet and cancer

dementia and cancer
colorectal cancer and genes
gastric cancer and metastases
the role of color Doppler US and prostrate cancer

A longer expression on the same semantic lines appears to be triggered by an

empirical process item (such as link, differs, relates, relationship) and
involves a collocational framework between _ and or {empirical process}
{between} {disease related phenomenon} and {disease}:

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gene expression differs between species and malignant tissues

link found between smoking and risk of cancer
relationship between gene and long term
amplification malignancy
relationship of GerB between and endometrical
expression cancer
Prototatic TRH relates between and high cell count
peptides

It is notable that these Titles (derived from the Medline subcorpus) involve
non-finite and finite clauses, which are as we have noted above a novel
characteristic of Titles in developmental biology. Besides relating previously
unrelated causes of disease, relationships are also established between
scientific disciplines:

The relation between clinical and histological

outcome
Bridging the gap between research and clinical practice

Similarly and links complementary items belonging to a limited class of

related items in the collocational framework in _ and

(cancer) in children and adolescents

(patterns of breast cancer) in Asian and Caucasian women
(clinical applications) in prognosis and disease monitoring.
(mechanism of action) in disease and. therapy

Such a framework of complementary listed items also appears to be initiated

by left-collocates of ‘of’ in expressions such as ‘Potential combination of’.
This includes research and empirical process items: detection, comparison,
impact, role, effect, levels. This leads to a longer collocational framework of
the form _ of _ in _ and _ As can be seen in a number of Titles in Appendix
2, a general pattern emerges with the following phraseology: {general
finding} of {focus of research: a biochemical entity} in {data sample}. For
example from the PSC:

- Prolonged retention of high concentrations of 5-fluorouracil in human and murine

tumours.

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- Developmental toxicity of boric acid in mice and rats.

- Antitumor activity of the aromatase inhibitor FCE 24928 on DMBA-induced mammary
tumors in ovariectomized rats treated with testosterone.
- Comparative immunology using intact fragments of ...anti-CEA antibody in a colonic
xenograft Model.
- The influence of the schedule and the dose of gemcitabine on the anti-tumour efficacy in
experimental human cancer.
- Characterization of p53 mutations in methylene chloride-induced lung tumors
from B6C3F1 mice.

It appears that the phraseology of the framework of_in_(and) forces us to

interpret each constituent in rhetorical rather than lexical terms. In other
words, nouns which would normally be seen as part of a general semantic
field have a specific role within the title. For example, developmental
toxicity, comparative immunology and characterization are seen as research
fields or research activities out of context, but in NP (nominal) Titles they
can be considered as the main finding of the article. Terms such as
Characterization and Developmental toxicity are claims as a function of
being placed in thematic position within a complex nominal, but their
associated meaning of result or finding is also reinforced by the appearance
of other lexical items which are unambiguously empirically oriented in this
position. They can be compared with The influence of the schedule ...
Antitumour activity and Prolonged retention which are specific claims about
effects or new data. In Titles, ‘Influence’ and ‘Antitumour’ express a
biochemical claim about causality, while ‘Prolonged’ makes an empirical
quantitative claim. This can be further compared with expressions in which
the second (grammatically subordinate) element is introduced by in and the
nominal head reformulates an empirical claim: Decreased resistance to N,N-
dimethylated anthracyclines in multidrug-resistant Friend erythroleukemia
cells. Nominal patterns with of and to express a transitive relationship and are
relatively fixed. They both operate in parallel to nominals with in. Patterns
with and are less fixed, but operate within the overall phraseology and extra
complexity within the nominal does not affect the overall pattern (as can be
seen in the Titles in Appendix 2). Such patterns provide a consistent schema
which places the findings of the research in thematic position when the Title
is expressed nominally (and this pattern differs considerably from the many
non-nominal Titles where the findings are placed more stereo-typically in
sentence-final ‘new’ position as in pS2 is an independent factor of good
prognosis in primary breast cancer ). My claim is therefore that while these
would perhaps be trivial patterns in terms of the general language,

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grammatical frameworks correspond to highly meaningful phraseology

within the context of research article Titles.

AND2 (Methods salient word 7)

As with the items ‘then’ and ‘each’ which we see below, the statistical
significance of ‘and’ in Methods sections is due to the general tendency to
sequence stages of clinical and empirical analysis. And is used in fixed
expressions which can be seen as routine collocations, as in the following
recurrent examples: cut and stained, cut and mounted, cut and plated,
cultured and plated , sected and stained with...treated and counterstained
with removed and routinely stained with...developed and stained... However,
chronological sequence is not always respected in the phraseology, and
clinical processes such as collected seem to be expressed as a redundant
intensifier:

collected and counterstored

collected and mounted
collected and placed
collected and stored

Such unremarkable phraseology stands in stark contrast to the key role of

and in the expression of causality in Titles.

2.3 DID1 (Abstract salient word 8)

We have seen in the basic statistical count that verb forms, especially
auxiliary and modal forms such as did and have are in fact somewhat less
frequent in the PSC in comparison with Cobuild. The salience of did in
Abstracts and Results is therefore significant, because we are dealing
therefore with a phraseology that is very specific to these two sections. The
modal verb did is only used in two ways in Abstracts: to introduce the
negative not, and in elliptical expressions such as <as did the> + NP...
Perhaps surprisingly, the presentation of negative results is a key function in
Abstracts. Such findings are included partly to deflect possible criticism but
also because empirical negative results are just as newsworthy in the
discussion of null-hypotheses.

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The subjects of did reflect the typical sentence themes of the Abstract:
processes of tumour growth (or stopping the growth) (propagation, growth,
expression, inhibition) and pharmaceutical molecules that are involved in
helping or hindering these processes (cholesterol, methyl chloride,
doxorubicin, heparin). Verbs that are negated tend to be empirical
measurement or reporting verbs prevalent after ‘but’ (<but did not>...
increase, decrease, show that). Typical subjects of these clauses are
quantitative empirical processes (efficiency, correlation, the data, sample
response). This pattern differs slightly for did in Results sections, where
negative findings tend to relate to empirical processes of causality rather than
quantification. The reason for the difference in expression may be that
Results sections tend to justify and explain negative findings (such as lack of
causality, effect or evidence) while Abstracts state data-related results,
leaving inferences about ‘higher’ empirical or research implications to the
main text.

DID2 (Results salient word 3)

I discuss the role of ‘did’ in Results sections in the next section (under not).
However, did is frequently used in two other important syntactic
environments. The first after but is as an intensifier of a biochemical process
or empirical finding (notice that in Abstracts expressions of this type involve
the negative not):

but did appear to induce protein

but did demonstrate the presence of
but did cause a statistically significant increase in the elimination of
but did cause some increase in the levels of CYP2A
but did cease to gain weight

The second use is elliptical after the conjunction than and an empirical or
biochemical process verb in a comparison of findings (such a discursive
expression is also not used in Abstracts):

caused more weight loss than it did in nontumour bearing mice

yielded more synergism than did exposure to Cis PT
exerted sig. higher toxicity than did danorubicin
produced much higher values than did cells pretreated with both

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treated mice generated more H2O2 than did C57BL mice

2. 4 FOR1 (Title salient word 2)

‘For’ is a significant salient word in Titles and generally signals a specific

research problem, usually a disease. Although rather infrequent in PSC
Titles, for emerges as a salient word when the larger control corpus (Medline
Titles) is compared with Medline Abstracts. In titles, for is used to
postmodify complex nominals and has the phraseological pattern: {treatment
related item X} for {disease related item Y}. This expression has two
variants: empirical or clinical process items:

empirical item: for disease:

consequences, estimates for colorectal / breast
implications, risk for advanced ovarian
risk factor for ... cancer

clinical item: for cancer of the liver...

diagnosis, radiotherapy, resection for
chemotherapy, screening, therapy for
surgery, uretoscopy for

In the larger Medline control corpus of titles, two thirds of expressions of this
sort are placed in thematic position as in Bioreversible protection for the
phospho group:.... in a similar results-related pattern to the one described
under and. For is thus not widely used as an adjunct in this part of the
research article.

FOR2 (Methods salient word 5)

In Titles ‘for’ is used in a number of expressions to link causality and

disease, whereas in Methods sections it expresses a stage of analysis within
the methodology, for example:

the primers were used for amplification

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the procedure was used for calculating the CI values

the probes were used for characterization of antibody
the supernatant was used for comparisons
the test was used for evaluation of patients

A particularly regular phraseology emerges in the expression ‘examined for’

which is effectively a prepositional verb with the phraseology {animate
donors / cells} <were examined for> {visible disease-related item}:

Five animals <were examined for> external defects

the animals <were examined for> soft tissue...abnormalities
Livers <were examined for> grossly visible lesions
donor organs <were examined for> visceral defects
Live fetuses <were examined for> gross defects
...carcasses <were examined for> malfunctions
Cell markers <were examined for> skeletal malformations
...cell lines <were examined for> malformation and variation

Such a regular phraseology demonstrates the effects of semantic prosody. For

example, in the following expression, The heads were senally sectioned and
examined for RT activity, we must assume that ‘RT activity’ is evidence of a
disease-related defect on the basis of the more general phraseology. It is
worth noting again at this point that when such related but disparate items are
observed in a regular phraseology they are seen as a collocational cluster.
Similarly, the adjectival complement expression <eligible for> is used to
signal the relevance of certain data and collocates with study:

fifteen patients were <eligible for> entry into the present study
the control group <eligible for> the study
In order to be <eligible for> the study
two groups were <eligible for> the present study

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2.5 HAVE1 (Introduction salient word 3)

The significance of have (and has) in Introduction sections confirms many

intuitive findings expressed in previous ESP research. In general the perfect
together with extraposed expressions in ‘it has been seen that’ is a
conventional way of reporting present research processes, while the present
tense, as we see for the item ‘is’ below is paradoxically used to report ‘given’
or ‘past’ biochemical facts. Over 55% of the instances of ‘have’ in the corpus
are involved in research reports in ‘have been’ (discussed below). Of the
remaining instances, the most common uses of the verb are as auxiliary in
impersonal summaries of previous research as in ‘has received’ / ‘have
received (little, much) attention’, and also ‘have attracted (much, a lot of)
debate, attention’. A particular phraseology is associated with the verb
‘show’, this time used in the active verb complement expression: <studies
have shown that> {biochemical result}:

Randomised clinical studies have shown that EPX is equivalent to MTX

Immunological studies have shown that oral feeding in drink water correlates with
several colonic cancers.
Some studies have shown that there is considerable heterogeneity
Earlier studies have shown that some activity mutation in ras genes are specific.
Previous studies in this laboratory have shown that semiempirical and ab initio
methods can be coupled...

The only exception to this pattern is the replacement of ‘studies’ by the

names of other researchers (Bardwell and Cheng have shown that, Tanish
and co-workers have shown that etc.). A similar and important use of the
verb is introduced by ‘we’ (except that the prefers verb is ‘found’: ‘we have
found that’) but this change in collocational behaviour is discussed below
under ‘we’. These general observations are in accordance with previous
research on tense (Heslot 1982, Salager-Meyer 1992). However, have is not
only used in the PSC in the direct reporting of past research but also in the
expression of subjective judgements. The third use of the verb does not report
previous research directly but expresses established facts in terms of positive
or negative evaluation (the bracketed words are non-optional evaluations):

... have a {profound} enabling effect

... have a {good} prognosis

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... have a {high} glycolytic rate

... have a {high} prognosis potential
... have {poor} capacity
... have {poor} oral availability
... have {significant} role
... have {totally different}molecular framework
... have {well-documented} effect

It is noticeable throughout the corpus that present tense simple relational

clauses of this type (involving has, have, is, are) almost always involve
subjective or evaluative expressions. Simple expressions of relation without
some explicit evaluation are rare. This is markedly different to patterns of
usage in the general language. The Cobuild dictionary does not lists
evaluation as a main use of is. It appears therefore that simple relational uses
of have often tend to be possessive, while is is often used in more impersonal
grammatical constructs, such as extraposed projections (it is safe to).

HAVE2 (Discussion salient word 10)

In Introductions ‘has, have’ are most often used with specific expressions of
past research reporting ‘have led to debate / has attracted attention’. In
Discussions, more specific research processes are more emphasised.
Although most research is expressed actively in terms of we (see ‘we’
below), passivised reports of research processes are the next most frequent
use:

have been detected

have been found to be
have been identified in
have been reported to
have been shown to

Another less dominant pattern involves reports of previous research similar to

that expressed in Introductions (the pattern have _ that can be seen to form a
consistent collocational framework with mental or verbal expressions of
research):
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previous studies have shown that

we have reported that
we have found that
clinical studies have demonstrated that
experiments have suggested that

And as in Introductions, attributive relational processes expressed by ‘have’

are used frequently to express evaluation, although this time in relation to
quantitative or specific results reported in the research article rather than
prior facts:

Biochemical report Evaluation Bio - / Empirical

process
surviving cells have aberrant morphology
the drug may have important implications
the current assays may have limited sensitivity
granisteron has been shown to have negligible agonist abilities
ragments have been reported to have superior localisation abilities

2.6 IN1 (Title salient word 5)

‘In’ is salient in four rhetorical sections in the corpus and presents us with the
opportunity to test whether phraseology is consistent throughout the corpus.
As noted above, prepositions appear to account for many of the major
differences in vocabulary and style between the PSC and the general
language (at least in terms of a comparison with Cobuild). The highly
frequent prepositions in and of in the corpus are thus key to an understanding
the fundamental phraseology of the genre. In Titles in functions as a
prepositional phrase functioning as either modifier or complement in
complex nominals (we have seen one use under and above). There are two
distinct semantic patterns:
1) In modifier expressions, the left collocate is a biochemical process and
the right collocate a clinical or biochemical entity. Where the head of the left
phrase is not the immediate collocate, the head item is usually an empirical or
clinical process. It is noticeable that for each left-collocate, a more or less

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limited pattern emerges to the left again of this item (for example, gene
expression). Head items are noted in italics:

Biochemical process Clinical or biochemical entity

changes in distribution of cancer in human, liver [etc]
intake and risk of cancer in children, primary care
improved detection of breast cancer in group practice, women
determination of screening for cancer in rats, Singapore,
surgical therapy of prostate cancer in the elderly, aged patients

gene expression in scrotal contents

receptor gene expression in breast CYP1A1

growth factors in Cancer

prognostic factors in colorectal cancer
Expression of trypsin and factors in gastric carcinoma
other
p53-like.., factors in HB carcinoma
p53 expression and other factors in breast cancer

diethyl analogue cell lines in Culture

growth-regulatory cell lines in a p53 pathway
human bladder cancer cell lines in Protein

larger auxiliary metastases in obese women

colorectal adrenal metastases in patients with (cancer)
breast cancer metastases in meginoma
evaluation of...hepatic metastases in patients
prediction of auxiliary lymph metastases in tumour-bearing animals
node

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The only exception to this pattern involves the modifier (of X) in patients
with:

Modified empirical item X in patients with Disease Y

chemotherapy determination in patients with malignant melanoma
cell activation levels in patients with terminal cancer
the function of folinic acid in patients with cancer of the liver
evaluation of pain measurement in patients with intraperitoneal
therapy malignancies
effectiveness of interferon alpha in patients with cancer
levels of coagulation factor in patients with cancer

2) In complement expressions, the left collocate is an empirical item for

which a statistical significance or medical potential is signaled in the Title.
While the first pattern for ‘in’ suggests a general tendency for the qualifying
phrase to specify the disease (or the subjects in which the disease is to be
found - a ‘spatial’ metaphor common in the general language), the right-
collocate in the second pattern completes the semantics of the left-collocate.
Right collocates are not clinical samples, as in (1) above, but empirical data
sets:

Empirical item Empirical data set

Significant change in levels of specific in vitro
residue
significant changes in cytokyne levels
highly significant change in levels of stromal antigens
change in cachexia mortality
change in distribution of histogenic
type
potential role in human disease
possible role in the metastatic process
suggests a role in tumor production

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The basic distinction between in 1) and in 2) echoes Sinclair’s observations

of of in the general language. In the first case, the phrase after in functions as
semantic support, whereas in complement expressions the prepositional
phrase is the semantic focus of the entire phrase (Sinclair 1991:82-83).

IN2 (Abstract salient word 5)

The spatial metaphor of in in Titles is not prevalent in the rest of the article.
‘In’ in Abstracts is used in three semantic patterns (the most frequent first).

1) as nominal modifier in expressions of measurement (significant increase

in toxicity, reduction in levels, differences in cytotoxicity, decrease in uptake)
2) as verbal modifier in attributive or relational clauses of biochemical
process (accumulates in, is low in, resistance was narrower in the cell) and
as a phrasal element in research processes (observed in, detected in) or
empirical processes (role in, resulted in, used in).
3) in an adjunct, introducing research with this (in this study/ trial/ phase 1
study/ report...).

In Abstracts, in also introduces non-finite relative clauses where given

information on a chemical process is bundled in with the original information
such as introduced in, involved in, implied in (as in: this is a novel approach
to adaptive resistance involved in the expression of ras oncogene). In Titles,
it can be seen that the majority of uses of in are determined by the right
collocate (in therefore completes the meaning of these expressions while
functioning as a ‘spatial’ modifier of the left-hand expression). In Abstracts
the spatial use of in is largely supplanted by a less specific meaning of the
prepositional phrase (a general biochemical / empirical process) and is
determined by the left-hand collocate. This also corresponds with the use of
the determiner the (largely absent in the right-hand collocates of in in Titles)
as in : classification / suppression / treatment / transmission / dissemination /
differentiation of the tumor / increase in... the total number of cells. On the
other hand, in is followed by zero-article in Abstracts in the case of
‘problem’ items: cancers, subjects or specific disease-related entities (cancer,
breast cancer, tumor-bearing animals, patients, tumor-bearing mice,
cytokines, methylene chloride). This pattern appears to revert to the use of in
in Titles.
It is likely that reference and other discoursal factors have a role to play in
this distinction although Master (1987) has claimed that discoursal factors
(while crucial elsewhere) do not affect generic article / zero-article usage. So
an alternative explanation may be that just as article usage is idiomatic in
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certain specific semantic domains in the general language, then it may be that
determiners are also constrained by prepositions in the ESP.

IN3 (Results salient word 2).

In is used in three types of phrase in Results. The first is to indicate positive

results which usually involve a higher experimental score or increased
amount of measurement. This can be contrasted with the negative results
which usually lack ‘direction’ (higher or lower score), and usually indicate
only the relevance of the result to the empirical model (‘directionless’
findings tend to be reported in Abstracts, as seen below). The second pattern
is closer to the spatial metaphor of in in Titles, indicating where a specific
biochemical process was found / observed in the bodies of patients or
subjects. A third pattern takes the form of a research process verb +
preposition functioning as a cross reference to another section of the article.
The first and the third patterns are specific to Results sections.

In the first pattern, the most typical use of ‘in’ is to express data direction
(increase in, increases in: 61 occurrences) after either a semi-technical
empirical verb such as ‘yields, expressed, produced’: {empirical process}
a/an {specific data shape} increase in {measurable, often disease-related
empirical item}:

treatment with resulted in an increase in relative tumor

butyrate weights
2 weeks exposure produced a linear increase the total number
in of.. tumors
exposure to produced an increase in incidence of renal
methylene chl. dilation
treatment with... led to an overall alkaline phosphase
carcinogens increase in activity
concentrations of expressed an increase in the total tumor
deoxy.. burden

One phraseology in particular becomes prevalent in Results sections in which

the verb yield is consistently followed by a post-nominal quantifier:
<increase in the level of>

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Treatment with yielded modest increase in the levels of lactase

dismutase
butyrate-treated cells yielded few increases in the level of fetal matter
cells preexposed to yielded an increase in the level spleen weight
butyrate of
treatment with yielded a increase in the level of ...lesions
cAMP significant
in vitro doses yielded a increase in the levels of ...resorption
similar

Another frequent expression in the first pattern involves the empirical process
‘resulted in’ in which the direction of the data is emphasised by some
intensifier: {clinical process} resulted in {intensifier} {empirical measure /
biochemical process}. Unlike the yielded phraseology, this expression
generally allows for very explicit modality (if no explicit evaluation is
expressed, then a determiner or similar expression to the first pattern is used):

Biochemical process Evaluation

analysis resulted in marked increases
protocols resulted in significant deaths
concentrations of dry MM resulted in negative induction
The same dose of DXR resulted in strong synergism
Since increasing the dietary BORA resulted in total loss of oral
viability...

The writer may also choose to express positive results as a relation (is, be,
were) with higher. Such a phraseology is oriented towards an evaluation of
change in biochemical data (in animals or cells): {empirical measure} is
{empirical evaluation} higher in {animate material}:

tended to be higher in dogs treated with

30mg
peak level is markedly higher in tumor cell lines
drug level is consistently higher in animals
leucocyte count is significantly higher in the liposomal DXR
groups

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5FU concentrations higher in animals necropsied at

were2 times

This is related to the second, spatial use of ‘in’ in Results sections, in which
the preposition introduces a biochemical. In some cases, as in the last
examples, the biochemical entity is a data set itself. For example, ‘in’ is used
in the basic comparison of results where the data sets are expressed as
subjects or patients:

liver neoplasms were more frequent than in animals

drug levels were 30 times higher than in controls
significantly higher levels in males
than
more typically lower in the corresponding
concentrations control group
oxidised bases are present at higher levels than in those receiving
liposomal drugs

A more typical spatial metaphor pattern involves technical biochemical

processes including the expression ‘in vivo’ (although this is a Latin
expression, its grammatical profile is similar to other modifiers or adjuncts
introduced by in). Various collocational expressions emerge in terms of the
spatial metaphor. ‘Activity’ for example usually takes place in organs:

cytotoxic activity in the organs

phosphatase activity in all the organs
PKC activity in cytosolic fractions
QK activity in various organs
antitumor activity in vivo

‘Concentrations’ are only found however in ‘tissues’ or ‘tumours’/ ‘tumors’:

variation of concentration/s in human tissues

relationship between 5FU concentration/s in liver metastases
Data represent concentration/s in murine tumors
x was the major metabolite concentration/s in perfused rat liver
measurement of concentration/s in tissues observed
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from the patient

The most frequent kind of materials to be found in biochemical entities are

proteins (27 instances) which are typically found or examined in mammary
cells:

examined the protein/s in normal mammary cells

found subcell location protein/s in mammary epithelial cells
the results show protein/s in epithelia; and fibroblast cells
detection of protein/s in tumor mammary cells
decreases the level of protein/s in breast tissue

Mutations in turn are typically detected in genes (the p53 gene, exon 6 of
p53, k-ras exons, H-ras gene). An alternative wording is to premodify the
mutation with a gene classifier, thus enabling it to be detected in tumours
[variation in spelling here indicates the use of British spelling in such
journals as BMJ, BJ, etc.]:

identification of ras mutations in liver tumors

p53 mutations in lung tumours
analysis of the p53 gene mutation in methylene chloride-induced lung tumors
r-ras mutation in case hepatomas
transcript mutation in tumour-bearing animals

The spatial use of ‘in’ also reveals terminological consistency within right-
hand collocates. For example, only nude mice are used for skin grafts:

xenografting in nude mice

in xenografts in nude mice
tumours xenografted in nude mice
inoculation or skingrafting in nude mice
The xenografts in nude mice

while frameworks with other common lexical items also reveal the
terminological properties of related words. For example, tumours are
associated with a variety of physiological locations (from genes and cells to

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organs) as well as a range of conditions (benign, necrotic, malignant), while

cancers are named in terms of larger organs and are less frequently
mentioned. Carcinomas are generally limited to the expression of cellular
cancers:

In benign, breast, clear-cell, colon, colorectal tumour/s...

epithelial, invasive, malignant, murine, necrotic, p53-
negative, primary, renal cell
Ta-Ti, Various
In Bladde, breast colonic, colorectal lung, oesophageal, cancer
pancreatic...
In Basal-cell, Cervical, colorectal, hepatocellular, human cell, carcinoma/s.
invasive, squamous cell ..

Interestingly, while the Latin ‘in vivo’ is often used as a sentence adjunct, its
complementary expression ‘in vitro’ tends to be used as a premodifier in
noun groups, and so we get the following expressions (in such usage in vitro
functions as a single lexical item - as such in vitro is not as clear-cut a case
of in as in vivo):

The <in vitro> antitumour activity

The <in vitro> culture
useful <in vitro> growth
various doses of <in vitro> results
PKC activity of the <in vitro> system

The third overall use of in is a text-referencing pattern, typical of Results

sections. This usage accounts for the most frequent lexical left-collocate of
in: ‘shown in’ (34 occurrences). The use of the present rather than past
passive is noticeable in the following examples:

Empirical measurement Research item

results are shown in table X
results of the present study are shown in fig. X
correlations shown in table X
tumour response is shown in table X
the perfusate profiles shown in fig. X

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A range of similar research-writing verbs play a similar role:

clinical details are detailed in table X

samples are given in fig. X
doses given are illustrated in table X
grain counts are listed in fig. X
these results are plotted in table X
values are presented in table X
NMR plotting is summarized in fig. X

Conversely, the expression ‘as described in’ is uniquely used to cross

reference to other sections of the research article, usually Methods, to
indicate that the research process referred to is detailed there:

analysed for the presence of oxidised DNA as described in Methods

bases
Incubation was carried out under conditions as described in Methods
tumours were examined histopathologically as described in the Methods
QR activity was determined as described in Materials and
Methods
Accumulation was measured using... as described in Materials and
Methods

The expression ‘as seen in’ is also involved in a longer fixed expression
observed in two structural chemistry texts:

difference from controls as seen in the first scoring event.

at this time point as seen in the first scoring event.
no change in esterase activity as seen in the first scoring event.
some intervals in rates as seen in the first scoring event.
significantly increased as seen in the first scoring event.

Finally, the use of ‘in’ in lexical phrases in Results is more varied than for the
other prepositions we observe in the corpus, and we note here briefly such
expressions as in addition, in all, in comparison, in contrast. This suggests
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that there is more explicit signalling in Results sections, although this is

somewhat terser than the kinds of expression encountered in Discussion
sections.

IN4 (Discussion salient word 6)

To summarise the uses of ‘in’ so far: in Titles, expressions after ‘in’ modify
some biochemical item or process (metastases in, expression in, growth in) or
complement an empirical item (role of... in, change in). Such patterning
constitutes important evidence for grammatical and semantic correspondence,
in other words a lexico-grammatical system. In Abstracts, we noted mostly
nominal reformulations of quantitative results and a number of expressions
involving empirical quantification (increase in, decrease in, reduction in,
difference in). In Results sections the use of in extends to more complex
forms of quantification, a spatial use with biochemical entities and the use of
lexical phrases and cross references to other parts of the research article. In
Discussion sections the tendency is again to express empirical shapes and
directions of data (the most frequent pattern) and causal relations (the second
pattern). A third pattern involves research processes, and a fourth comprises
large numbers of discourse markers. Such increasing variation in the
phraseology of a single grammatical item supports a general observation that
the final sections of the research article become increasingly stylistically
diverse.
The role of the Discussion section also returns to explanation, in a similar
mode to that of Introduction sections. Thus the fixed expression <play a role
in> becomes a significant phrase in Discussions where some degree of
explicit evaluation is often present:

linkage does not play a major role in modulating the

conformation of DNA
Our findings suggest that CsA might play a role in the differentiation of cells
Also, longbond structures could play an important role in other bond
scission reactions
The phenopholyation of c143 TAA plays some role in the malignant
proliferation of cells
accumulation of p53 alterations may play an important role in regulation of the
proliferation... of cells

Biochemical items are described as (spatially) ‘present’ and stated as

implicitly observed facts:
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other transcription factors are present in these cells

other factors are present in the calf serum
p53 mutations were present in the majority of cancer cells
a small amount of contaminating mouse present in the tissue
skin was
except for the 1464cm mode that is present in nearly all the resonance
spectra

A similar pattern is seen in verb- or adjective- complement expressions is

reflected in, is similar in, and is visible in. Unlike many simple present tense
use of relational verbs in the corpus, adjectives used in complement
constructions are rarely accompanied by explicit evaluation. This represents a
general move away from quantified observation in Results sections to
qualified empirical observation. Specific results are reformulated or
identified as ‘found’ or ‘observed’ in the passive (similar response was
observed in this study, LOH has already been found in all renal tumours).
Finally, ‘in’ tends to be used in complex NP-complement prepositions. These
take the form of collocational frameworks where the whole expression
functions as a discourse marker. For example, ‘in _ to’ allows for contrasts:

in response to normal smooth muscle tissue

in addition to benign tumours
in contrast to benign smooth tissue and leiomyas

while ‘in_ with’ signals that findings have or have not been replicated
elsewhere:

in agreement with published data

in combination with other methylene results
in concurrence with Belleville et al.
in conjunction with the results obtained

2.7 IS1 (Introduction salient word 4)

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The verb is is fundamental to the phraseology of Introduction sections. As

with the relational verbs ‘has / have’, is is used to signal explicit evaluation.
In the PSC, the phraseological patterns of is are (in order of frequency):

1) Introducing an extraposed adjectival complement clause: It is {modal

item} that {treatment related item X} {biochemical / empirical process}:

It is unlikely that (X) does not express its gene products

It is possible plays a key role
It is assumed increases in direct relation to
It is possible needs to be well separated
It is conceived differs at the level of tumor production
It is well known can be modulated
It is relevant is the main source of circulatory...

2) Introducing an extraposed adjectival non-finite complement clause

(limited to three adjectives) It is {modality item} to {research process}

It is possible to identify TAAs that allow

It is necessary to assess the cell differentiation at this stage
It is important to obtain structural information
It is possible to construct a series of... structures
It is necessary to identify mechanisms of drug resistance
It is possible to repeat measurements
It is necessary to establish whether
It is important to study forms of the enzyme

3) Introducing an adjectival or verbal non-finite complement clause: a

{Biochemical process} is {research utterance} to {biochemical process}.
There are only three possibilities for this type of expression. These are
alternative expressions, indicating decreasing levels of certainty through
modulation in verb group complexes (a type of grammatical metaphor):

Hyperphasia is known to inhibit

Enzymatic... is known to processed generally via

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HPV 16 E6 is known to bind p53

metabolism inc- is known to be proton-elevated
cells
{Biochemical} is likely to be involved in...
is likely to arise from differences in...
is likely to differentiate in many cells
is likely to attract factors from hepatocytes
{Biochemical} is thought to be a major factor in
is thought to determine cell cycle
is thought to act via ....crosslinking
is thought to be one of the most important

4) A fourth use involves equative relational clauses: where X is a specific

{biochemical process or item} : Pancreitis, resistance to therapy, BORA, the
Winsford deposit...

X is a/an common predictor X is a/an important target

X is an appealing alternative X is an effective inhibitor
method
X is a critical parameter X is a potent derivative
X is a major Sign X is a potential agent
X is an imperfect route X is a strong inhibitor

Impersonal existential clauses are also used to express explicit evaluation:

there is a strong motivation

there is a substantial difference
there is a positive correlation
there is a clear need
there is a significant possibility

When ‘is’ is used in equative relational clauses (i.e. where the verb simply
identifies one token as another), the element of evaluation is transferred to a
notion of ‘measure’ or ‘causality’ as in the fixed expressions ‘is one of the

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most...is one of the main causes of’. In attributive clauses, on the other hand,
disease- and treatment- related items have stereotypical patterns Only disease
related items, for example can be ‘associated with’:

toxicity is associated with

weight loss is associated with
aberrant cell proliferation is associated with
an exogenous retrovirus that is associated with
overexpression of p185 gene is associated with

Conversely, only treatment-related items are expressed in comparison, using

‘more’ {+ empirical property}:

target orientation is more efficient

MTX as an inhibitor is more efficacious
a new foliative agent is more localised
this choice of prodrug is more popular
antitumour activity is more table

The reason for these patterns stems fairly straightforwardly from the research
activity. Diseases are being associated with potential causes, while treatments
are being compared and measured. So phraseological patterns correlate
according to some convention with the common semantic categories
naturally involved in the research. This is complicated however by the
varying phraseologies of different word forms. I note later that these patterns
do not correspond with the use of ‘was’ (in Methods and Results sections).
Is also reveals a limited set of items which can introduce nominal
complement (projecting) clauses (known as ‘fact clauses’, as in the fact is
that: Halliday 1985:244). Fact clauses in the corpus are almost always
empirical and premodified by some degree of evaluation. The following list
gives all the possibilities:

A disadvantage... is that a magnetic field may enhance...

The most direct evidence is that coagulation factors diffuse

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A simple explanation is that none of these is currently in use

The expectation is that PTC apparently does not show...
An intriguing observation is that these compounds are t-promoters
A major obstacle is that they repel.
An interesting outcome... is that the polar effect is masked

However, there is one important exception to the evaluative pattern for ‘is’.
In the Introduction corpus, when the researchers are saying that something is
not something else, explicit evaluation becomes more implicit:

Although its sensitivity to is not yet proven, mouse stamen have been
ATP examined...
Although cholesterol is not fully responsible for the formation of
liposomes, it is often used in pharmaceutical
liposome formulation
Although the regulation of is not fully understood [it and others] appear to
MyoD1 perform critical functions
Despite massive lipid is not elevated in the cachectic state...
mobilisation, the plasma
level of these metabolites
While p52 expression is not detected, it is unlikely that overexpression is
related to LMF factors outside the cell.

Again, the negative relates to empirical or research processes in similar

expressions to the pattern ‘Although it has not been shown that’ described
under ‘been’ below. To summarise, affirmative phrases with ‘is’ almost
exclusively express modality in terms of empirical processes. Negative
expressions of relation, however, deal with the full range of research,
empirical and biochemical processes. In both patterns, the distinction
between various genre-specific process types {biochemical, empirical,
research} appears to coincide (in some cases) exactly with syntactic patterns.

IS2 (Discussion salient word 4).

‘Is’ is a salient word in Introduction and Discussion sections. In

Introductions, the major patterns were seen to be:

1) It is {empirical item} that {biochemical process}

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2) It is {evaluated empirical process} to {research process}

3) {Biochemical process} is {research utterance} to {biochemical
process}

In Discussion sections, as with other grammatical items the patterns are more
distributed across a range of expressions, have a greater emphasis on research
processes and evaluation and have in some cases different lexical
components:

1) It is {evaluated empirical item} that {biochemical process}

2) It is {evaluated empirical item} to {research process}
3) There is a {evaluated empirical item}
4) (This) is {attributive research / evaluative process}
5) {Research process} is not {evaluative}
6) {Biochemical process} is {biochemical / empirical process}

Projecting (verb / adjective complement) clauses are still prevalent in

Discussions however the range of adjectives and participles involved is
somewhat more restricted. Whereas most projection in Introductions is
related to modality and hedging, projections in Discussions sections
emphasise more affirmative evaluation:

It is interesting that
It is apparent that
It is clear that
It is most likely that

Less affirmative modality is expressed by extraposed non-finite (to) clauses

(‘It is AP to’):

It is possible to screen for cell lines

It is difficult to determine influence
It is important to mechanistically link
It is unlikely to be the case that

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A fixed lexical phrase is used to introduce a new research gap: <little is

known about> and this differs from the use of ‘known’ in Introductions (X is
known to):

Little is known about hepatic regulation

Little is known about hepatocarcinogenesis
Little is known about the way the relationship helps changes in immune tests
Little is known about the physiological importance of ... endothelin
Little is known about the behaviours of p53 gene

In Introductions, negative relational processes are concerned with negating

the empirical relevance of biochemical processes (sensitivity is not detected,
cholesterol is not applicable). Here the tendency is to express a negative
evaluation of the research process:

It is not yet clear (x5)

The latter finding is not convincingly determined
the present study is not feasible
The reason for this unexpected result is not known
Sampling required for analysis is not very defined
The functional implication is not surprising
This strategy is not very different

When results are expressed after expressions of biochemical processes, some

degree of quantification is expressed as an adjunct: {biochemical entity} is
{biochemical process: expressed} {quantification}:

the polypeptide is expressed at a very low stage of differentiation

activity is expressed only in a minority of the tumor cells
peripherin is expressed at high levels
protein is expressed as micromoles
tumor size is expressed by diameter

There are also a number of explanatory expressions where a biochemical

process of disease or treatment is empirically related to observed data:

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hypoglycaemia is associated with considerable increase in

The tumor mechanism is associated with acquisition of t-cell properties
The MAC tumor is associated with increased lactation
MOR phenotype is associated with enhanced stability
Oncogene p185 is associated with internalization of bleeding

damage is due to observed alterations

induction in the liver is due to direct action
The presence of normal bones is due to direct interaction
Suppression is due to subsequent incubation
The positive reaction is due to the effect of.. filters

However, these patterns contrast with ‘is related to’ which has as subject an
empirical observation which is related to more specifically biochemically
oriented items. Unlike empirical expressions in Abstracts and Results
sections, and as noted above in the phraseology of in, these phrases deal more
with qualitative explanation than with quantitative measurement. The
following pattern is shared by less frequent expressions (‘is present in’, and
‘is responsible for’):

risk is related to ethnicity

efficiency is related to stabilisation
the cause of toxicity is related to spasmodic polypeptides
presence of protein is related to expression of class III antigens
frequency in some tumor is related to the schedule of administration
samples

2.8 NOT1 (Results salient word 4)

As might be expected, the phraseology of not has less to do with

propositional negation and more to do with a broader rhetorical distinction
between empirical tendencies and findings (the affirmative) and empirical
explanation (the negative). Examining the patterns of verbs used with not, we
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can see that while verbs like ‘show’ are used in affirmative statements to
describe ‘increases in’ the data, or changes of the data shape (as described
under ‘in’ above) negative expressions with ‘show’ are used mostly to
explain the relevance of data or the idea that a specific biochemical
phenomenon did not take place. The implication is that in Results sections,
the researchers are making a statement about causality in relation to their
‘failed’ or negative hypotheses but use positive statements for reporting
changes in the data shape. This is contrary to the pattern in Abstracts, where
negative polarity is reserved for quantitative statements (usually related to
adversative expressions signalled by but).
The most frequent right-collocate of not is ‘show’: {biochemical entity,
usually living cells} did not show {biochemical process, usually treatment
related}:

controls did not show RT activity

females did not show any antitumor effect
MCR lines did not show cross-resistance
chemo-treated mice did not show greater response
the population did not show allelic loss

Similarly, the very frequent right-collocate, ‘differ’ emerges in a very fixed

expression of findings: {biochemical process} did not differ {empirical
evaluation of measurement or sometimes biochemical process} from that /
those {research process}:

concentrations did not differ

bile content did not differ morphologically from that of
the consumption rate did not differ significantly from those measured
extravasation did not differ significantly from those observed
the lipolytic factor did not differ significantly from that seen in

Empirical measurement items such as: incidence, concentrations, increasing

serum levels, body weight, leucocyte counts are all used in a similar way in a
relational clause: were not statistically significant. This can be contrasted
with affirmative relational clauses and uses of the verb ‘show’ in which
researchers tend to write that data are ‘increased’ or ‘elevated’.

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Clearer examples of the negative in biochemical processes involve the

expressions of the very frequent verbs ‘express’ and ‘induce’, and this again
reveals common subject-verb preferences. Cells or cell lines ‘express’
biochemical compounds,

the majority of cells did not express peripherin (x3 instances)

cells in this clone did not express RA activity
some cell lines did not express myocenin
only one clone did not express t-PA
the g14 cell line did not express capsid antigen

while drug therapies tend to ‘induce’ biochemical effects:

chemotherapy did not induce a depressor gene

lower doses did not induce any antitumor effect
CYPZA did not induce loss of weight
peptide did not induce any cytotoxicity
stronger treatment did not induce weight loss

Such biochemical process verbs have very much the same distribution as
nominalisations (c.f. induction of tumor necrosis factor). But there are also
cases in which biochemical processes are explained rather than simply
observed, in which case the writers use less technical verbs such as ‘cause’
and ‘affect’. For example, ‘affect’ is very specifically limited to the chemical
process of (cell) binding:

pre-incubation did not affect cell growth

IL 2 secretion did not affect anchorage
Those inhibitors did not affect binding
Antibiotic did not affect subsequent binding
concentrations
magnetic field exposure did not affect binding capacity

In the passive the affecting medium (expressed a left-collocate above) is

reformulated as a ‘treatment’:
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accumulation was not affected by the treatment

relaxations were not affected by nitro-L-arginine at any
dose
reaction kinetics were not affected by incorporation of
cholesterol
excretion vomiting was not affected by the presence of
...danorubicin
weight gain was not affected by treatment with... antibodies

‘Cause’ is not passivised, but similarly presents a biochemical relationship

albeit of a less restricted variety:

did not cause mutations in the p53 gene

did not cause further inhibition
did not cause lysis
did not cause any mortality
did not cause tumorigenesis

Such expressions can be partly seen as brief claims or explanations, but can
equally be seen as fixed delexical phrases (such as take a bath, make one’s
fortune). Apart from biochemical or semi-technical explanations, the negative
in the Results section is also used to signal what the researchers didn’t find.
With ‘was / were’, we see below that the passive in Methods sections tends to
be used with technical biochemical process verbs. In Results, the passive
reverts to research process verbs and, at least in negative voice, is usually
modal: {biochemical process} could not be {research process}:

lipophilicity could not be detected

degenerated mitochondria could not be explained
chimeric mRNA could not be related
Overexpression of p53 could not be observed.

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Other verbs involved in this expression are distinguished, established,

maintained.

NOT2 (Discussion salient word 7).

Whereas in the Results subcorpus, negative statements concerned causal

relationships (affect, cause, express) and the general shape of the data (did
not increase, is not different etc.) the Discussion sections express negative
research observations. Again, unlike Abstracts, data directions are not
emphasised in Discussion sections, and the emphasis is more on
reformulating results than on explaining negative results. One research
pattern emerges as a very regular collocational framework: ‘did not {research
process} any {empirical item}’ and it serves to report negative results:

we did not detect any changes

we could not find relations
we did not observe tumor development
we could not obtain evidence of precursor
Early reports did not suggest major difference

The negative also plays a key role in signalling gaps in existing research. The
expression, not known is part of the ‘end-game’ of the Discussion section
which allows for further applied research:

The specific source of serum To is not known

The exact mechanisms of the antitumour effect of IFN are not known
The functional implication... is not known
Whether this is also reflected in demethylyation... is not known
The nature of the inhibitory factor is not known

Another important signal for future research possibilities is ‘not clear’ where
negative findings are reformulated by higher empirical or research processes
(in italics):

The reason for this difference is not clear.

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The reason for this latter finding is not clear.

However, it is not clear what differences if any
exist.
The relationship between gene p53 is not clear.
mutations and p-expression

with one longer reformulation:

It is therefore not clear why cells are not able to [use] serum plasmogen.

2.9 OF1 (Title salient word 1)

‘Of’ eclipses ‘the’ in an Astec comparison with the Cobuild corpus, and is a
salient word in Titles, Abstract and Introduction sections, thus marking its
phraseology as particularly typical of technical science writing. While the use
of of described below is somewhat complex, it is worth noting that the four or
five major uses of the preposition in the PSC can be contrasted with a very
broad set of uses in the general language: Cobuild, for example, lists 19 non-
idiomatic uses for ‘of’.
In Titles, as in the rest of the corpus, ‘of’ is fundamental to the
construction of complex nominals, in particular expressions of empirical
relations and quantification as well as compound nominal terminology. In
Titles there are no examples of quantification (a number of), or support (a
group of). Instead, ‘of’’s left-collocates are nominalisations of research or
empirical processes (effect/s of x30, treatment of x24, study of x16,
evaluation of x15) while its right-collocates are nouns synonymous with the
illness or the patient (cancer x69, human x26, breast x25, patients x18,
tumor x15, prostate x13). The majority of the left-collocates of ‘of’ can be
divided into four groups of patterns. Research processes are the most frequent
left-collocates of of in Titles, and typical expressions from the Medline
control corpus include nominal research process titles premodified by a topic-
specific specifier and post-modified by illness-related items most often
involving cancer patients. The expression ‘study of’ is typical:

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Therapeutic study of metastasis in women aged over 40

Basic study of post-operative surgery
Comparative study of NCC-ST-439 in breast cancer.
Collaborative study of subjects participating in...trials
Case - control study of HIV-infected carriers
Immunohistochemical study of women with early breast cancer.

The research process expression -evaluation of- (x15 in Medline) is different

in that it is seldom premodified (and is thus usually the first word of the
Title), and appears to have a more limited set of postmodifiers, such as semi-
technical empirical process items which are less concrete than those for
‘study of’:

Evaluation of effects of radical resection on liver metastasis

Evaluation of factors aggravating postoperative recovery
Evaluation of factors affecting success of chemotherapy
Evaluation of factors affecting laboratory data
Evaluation of quality of life in postchemotherapy

We have seen in a number of instances a small change of expression is

associated with a change in the semantic composition of the phrase. To
demonstrate this we can see that the expression ‘study on’ has a different
phraseological pattern from ‘study of’. Left collocates are more limited for
‘study on’ but are more specific in terms of research activity (case control x5,
clinical x3, basic x3, clinicopathological x2, collaborative,
immunohistochemical, population-based, randomized, retrospective,
screening). Right hand collocates of -study on- are empirical processes or
items, rather than disease-related items introduced by ‘study of’:

A {research process} study on clinical prediction

A {research process} study on effects of continued...infusion
A {research process} study on effectiveness of UFT against cancer
A {research process} study on the inhibition effect of granisteron on...
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A {research process} study on usefulness of bleomycin in comparison with...

My claim is that the most stable elements of a phraseological opposition are

important signals of the larger phraseology i.e. ‘{research process X} study
of {disease Y}’ on the one hand and ‘A {specific research process X} study
on {empirical process Y}’ on the other. This can be seen to be an entirely
conventional distinction, with little relation to any intrinsic meaning of the
prepositions concerned. The distinction cannot be put down to lexical
selection (or ‘lexical projection’ as in universal grammar), since both
expressions share the same left-hand collocates. If there were some base
meaning for ‘of’ (as claimed by Quirk 1995) then ‘Evaluation of’ would not
have a different pattern to other ‘of’ phrases introduced by research process
items, nor share a similar phraseology to ‘study on’.

Clinical process phrases such as ‘treatment of’ and ‘management of’ share a
similar phraseology to ‘study of’:

surgical treatment of solid carcinomas

combined treatment of human breast cancer
recombinant treatment of gastric cancers in Singapore
surgical treatment of breast cancer patients treated with
EORTC

Of empirical processes, the phrase ‘effect/s of’ is the most frequent in the
subcorpus and has the following phraseology: {treatment-related item X}
effect/s of {treatment X} on {illness-related item Y}:

effect/s of chemotherapy on metastases

biphasic effect/s of aspirin on colorectal cancer
inhibition effect/s of surgical intervention on pancreatic cancer
prognostic effect/s of optimism on cancer related stress
therapeutic effect/s of somostratin on the growth of... cancer

This kind of pattern is a collocational framework can be seen to be similar in

semantics to ‘study on’ which in turn sometimes introduces effects of. A
chain of phrases may be inevitable in such a conventional context, and we
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find that there are many such ‘collocational cascades’ in the corpus. What is
interesting about them is that phrases such as ‘effects of’ appear to be implicit
in the longer chains, or are reformulated.
An idiomatic use of the phrase ‘a case of’ emerges. While the word ‘case’
on its own is involved in the longer phraseology ‘a case control study in
(Brazil / Greece / Sweden) of (subjects participating in the Nottingham
study / the blood screening programme)’, it also acts as head for 12 titles
introducing specific disease-related items which are then postmodified by a
response to the disease {treatment} or (in a minority of examples) an
explanation of its cause:

A case of complete response by intra-arterial injection

A case of advanced oesophageal carcinoma treated by...
A case of lung cancer responding significantly to...
A case of pulmonary carcinoma which responded to treatment with
A case of drug induced pneumonitis caused by oral etoposide.

OF2 (Abstract salient word 3)

In the control corpus of Titles (as seen above), of plays a key role in nominal
groups with a typical treatment-of-disease pattern. Such a symmetrical
solution-problem pattern is expanded in Abstracts, the major difference being
that while items in the title corpus tend to predict of with no strong right-
collocates, in Abstracts there are just as many significant right-collocates,
such as human, these, was. Another difference from Titles is that Abstracts
involve the quantification or description of disease, where of introduces
semantic ‘support’ (not necessarily ‘head’): number, concentration, levels,
incidence, frequency, majority, presence ... of... cancer, tumour, oncogene,
growth, expression, patients, mice, human. A second pattern tends to
introduce either empirical or biochemical items that explain the potential
treatment of the disease (effect, role, mechanism, treatment / inhibition,
synthesis... of.. drug X, doxorubicin, compounds, [disease Y]). As the first
element becomes more necessary to the interpretation of the next item, the
phrase introduced by of in the second group can be seen as ‘focus’ rather than
support (Sinclair 1991:82-83).
The ‘treatment-of-disease’ pattern can be seen as an overriding pattern,
but within this there is considerable phraseological change. There are four
different problem-solution patterns of complex stereotypical phraseology
involving of in the Abstract: (effect, loss, number, presence). There does not

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seem to be any evidence to suggest that any such middle frequency item
(often termed sub-technical items: Francis 1993) shares the same phraseology
as any other. In particular, the solution- problem / treatment- disease pattern
seen in the Title does not appear to be fixed for each item in the Abstract. For
example, presence of has a specific pattern if post-modified: the role/
presence of {drug X} in {illness Y}. Other items require more explicit
modification. Effects and effect are usually in subject position and are almost
always pre-modified by a treatment-oriented item (growth-inhibitory,
antitumour, chemopreventive, protective) or a research-observation item
indicating some problem (adverse, side-effect, toxic). On the other hand,
presence is often used in a prepositional phrase functioning as qualifier,
(preceded by in, for, on) or in a subordinate clause where there is no explicit
statement of problem or solution, and where presence of signals an illness-
related specific item where a possible link with cancer is being explored:
retrovirus, ras proto-oncogenes, maternal toxicity.
In addition, the expression use of represents one of the more stereotypical
patterns of the Abstract. It is always preceded by some degree of measure or
a methods-oriented specification of use (daily, widespread, regular,
intensive, combined, clinical, potential) and followed by a specific drug X(1)
and an expansion of the treatment and illness (with drug X(2), in the study of
illness Y, in the treatment of, in the evaluation of Y) and finally followed by
some degree of evaluation or a research process: resulted in..., should be
considered, is discouraged, is discussed.
In a different kind of distribution, the significant collocate loss appears to
have become terminologised in the fixed expression loss of heterozygocity.
Loss also appears in thematic position whereby a research statement is
phrased in the passive or placed after the term (loss of X...was found,
occurred, occurring), although there are reporting instances such as suggest
that .... which form a separate pattern. The pattern occurs more regularly with
effect/s where specific reporting items are sometimes placed as hedges:
(effect/s of X... were found, reduced, appeared to be.., as shown..., and seem
to...). Interestingly, among most of the expressions of measurement-disease
mentioned above, the reporting verb precedes the expression (shows /
confirms / indicates ...the presence of, incidence of, absence of). The final,
fourth pattern is represented by the expression number of which is not
immediately preceded or followed by a reporting discourse item. It may be
that there is a differentiated pattern of phraseology in which of has a role as
constructor of nominalisations of measurement and qualification (i.e. the first
use mentioned above), in conjunction with expressions of research reporting
and evaluation (the second use). The writer can thus choose to emphasise the
‘self evidence’ of the data by evoking phrases involving number of, or may

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wish to place the study in the position of sentence theme (that is: as subject or
in front of the subject in English). These patterns also suggest that choice of
expression in Titles is constrained to the extent that the writer must either use
measurement-disease phrases as a statement of research topic, or
alternatively thematicise the results and use an expression with items such as
effects.

OF3 (Introduction salient word 9).

‘Of’ in the Introduction serves to qualify empirical process nouns and to form
fixed biochemical or clinical terminology. This is the same function as in
Titles and Abstracts, the difference being that the fixed expressions and
collocations in the Introduction are expanded to longer stretches of
phraseology. In examining the very complex phraseology of of in this less
constrained environment, the assumption is that collocation operates at longer
boundaries than the phrase. The following left / right collocates demonstrate
the variety of collocation:

Left collocates >10: effects, concentration, treatment, effect, number, presence,

variety, activity, results, mechanism, administration, use, because, levels.

Right collocates >10: this, these, cells, human, compounds, drug, mice, drugs,
mice, methylene, studies, cancer, Bora, liver, cell, chloride, effects .

A number of longer phrases become prevalent in the Introduction and a

number of phrases identified in the Title or Abstract take on a different
environment. In particular we find a strikingly long collocational framework
in the form of a projecting fact-clause: <the aim / purpose of> (this study)
<was to> {+ research process} {measurable biochemical activity} (16
occurrences) :

The aim of this study was to compare

The aims of the present study were to examine (x3)
The purpose of the current report was to investigate
The aims of this work were to relate
The aim of this series of studies was to measure uptake
The aims of this study were to test
The aim of the present study was to expand data
The aim of the current report was to identify
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The aims of this work were to determine

The (missing) complements of the research processes above are measurable

activities: activation, uptake, circulatory responses, pharmokinetics in the
liver, concentration of pituitary humours, p52 on mRNA expression, a
possible prognostic of tumour regression..... While in the abstract expressions
involving effects of are generally followed by some degree of evaluation or
an empirical process (the effects of treatment X are demonstrated) here the
phrase occurs as complement of some research process:

{research process} {treatment related item X} effect of {treatment X}

assess the adverse antitumour effects of BORA

investigate the chemopreventative effect of boron on mice
show the inhibitory effect of cholesterol
report protective effect of Doxo drugs
compare cytotoxic effects of displatin treatment

In Titles and Abstracts, we identified the role of ‘of’ in fixed terminology. In

Introductions we find that fixed expressions have regular phraseologies
beyond their internal components, possibly because there are simply more
data for us to spot long range relations rather than because of any quality of
Introduction sections. The term ‘mechanism of action’ appears to occur in a
surprisingly delimited phraseological context: mechanism of action of
{disease-related item} model {modalised or negative research process}:

The mechanism of action of human tumour model systems is

The mechanism of action of their cytostatic action appears to be
mutagenic
Thus mechanism of action of human tumor models has not been
determined with certainty
The mechanism of action of methylene chloride has not been
clarified
However the mechanism of action of these tumor models can be deciphered
Although the mechanism of action of some carcinogens remains unknown...

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A longer phraseology can also be seen in a common expression in Abstracts

treatment of, which is now premodified by a combination of recurrent
expressions in Introductions (we present one example of each):

{empirical problem or role} in/ for / by treatment of {disease Y}

...is a common clinical in the treatment of adult acute leukaemia

problem
... expression... is induced by treatment of tumour cells with cAMP
analogues.
... an alternative strategy for treatment of hepatoma...
...is... a promising for the treatment of topical infections.
candidate

One particularly interesting term ‘drug of choice’ (6 occurrences) collocates

with ‘in the treatment of’. Even more striking is the level of reformulation of
similar concepts for new drugs used in the longer phraseology: {treatment X}
is a {new} drug (commonly) used in the treatment of {disease Y}:

aca C, a drug commonly used in the treatment of breast cancer

patients
APD a commonly used drug in the treatment of cancer
Harris et al. suggest the drug of potential in the treatment of ...tumours.
value used
(drug X) is a new H2 used in the treatment of cancer
(drug X) is a recent antagonist used in the treatment of gastric and duodenal
cancer
(drug X) is a metallic antineoplastic in the treatment of ... breast cancer
agent that is used

Of also introduces quantitative focus expressions in Introductions such as a

variety of. The framework is involved in a longer phraseology: {biochemical
process / entity or at times empirical process} is {used / empirical process} in
(a) (wide) variety of- {treatment / disease related items):

Enzymes are involved in a variety of anticancer drugs

Both are inactivated in a variety of industrial drugs

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Both are used as a solvent in a variety of industrial drugs

Methyl chloride is used in a variety of consumer drugs
Methylene is used in a variety of pharmaceutical applications

2.10 THAT1 (Abstract salient word 7)

‘That’ as conjunction plays an important role in reformulating the claim as a

cognitive research process (The idea that, we conclude that). A frequent use
of ‘that’ in Abstracts is in extraposed it clauses following verbs of cognition
and belief (it is ...believed, expected, concluded ... that) or adjectives of
possibility or volition (important, possible, likely, desirable, evident).
Similarly reporting clauses have clear limitations on the subject of the clause:

we conclude that
we find that

while more data-oriented items used introduce indicate,

values indicate that

findings indicated that
results indicate that
information indicated that

The items studies and results also introduce demonstrated. A similar

pattern is observed in Discussion sections. One difference with the
Discussion section is the important rôle of ‘that’ as relative pronoun in
embedded clauses. That functions refers most often back to a specific
chemical and establishing some characteristic function of the entity: (Z
occurred to chemical X that is...normally responsible for, typical, expressed
only as, effective in maintaining levels of) or emphasising the status of the
knowledge structure (allow prediction of experimental factors that underline
our lack of understanding of these processes). Such uses of that (and, indeed
who) as relatives confirms Kretzenbacher’s (1990) finding that embedded
clauses are an important characteristic of Abstracts.

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THAT2 (Discussion salient word 1).

‘That’ is the most significant salient word in Discussion sections. The word is
listed by Wordlist as one of the least salient words of the other rhetorical
sections however, with the one interesting exception of Abstracts. In
Discussion sections, ‘that’ indicates the primary use of complement that-
clauses which function as projections of research reports and facts (Halliday
1985:244). In terms of rhetorical function, that-clauses reformulate or
evaluate results. That-clauses can be divided into four patterns in Discussion
sections, in order of frequency of occurrence:

1) Research item + research process + hypotactic projections.

2) We / This study +research process + hypotactic projections.
3) Extraposed it + projections of modality.
4) Research item-embedded projections.

The first three lexical left-collocates of ‘that’ are all research processes
involved in the first pattern (verb complement clauses: suggest/s that,
indicate that, show/n that), but they have very different modalities associated
with their subordinate clauses. The first example, ‘suggest/s that’, is
introduced by an empirical measurement as subject, and the verb in the
subordinate clause usually has some degree of modality or phase:

data suggests that reactive oxygen would be important

evidence suggests that simple sampling can be performed
the model data suggest that endothelin receptors might play a role
a number of observations suggest that MQ MT is unlikely to play a role in
lack of ...activity suggests that patients should be monitored

As a more affirmative expression, ‘indicate/s that’ is introduced by deictic

research process items as subjects and no modality in the subordinate clause:

These findings indicate that a cell has become committed to the.. lineage
These results indicate that the cell has been arrested early in..
development
The present study indicates that this parameter is highly correlated with
our data indicate that LIC is less immunogenic than other tumors
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our data indicate that ras activation is an early event

Related to this structure, we find cleft noun complement clauses introduced

by a limited type of empirical or research process subject:

The strength of this model {empirical) is that

One drawback of such models {empirical) is that
Another possibility {empirical) is that
One disadvantage {empirical) is that
The potential explanation {research) is that
The main conclusion {research) is that

The second pattern we find is syntactically the same as the first, except that
the subject tends to be ‘we’ or (depending on the verb) ‘this study’ or the
names of other researchers. The first most frequent pattern of this type
‘showed that’ tends to entail more evaluation or negative results than its
present tense counterpart ‘show that’. Also unlike ‘show that’, it has ‘we’ and
‘experiments’ as possible subjects:

{Research item} {Biochemical / Empirical process}

Experiments showed that there was no homology in this region

we showed that there are no differences in drug uptake
studies showed that the compound was not an inhibitor
we showed that the parent compound was extensively
metabolised
studies showed that active management was preferable

Another frequent expression, but which expresses a different phraseology is

‘we conclude’. This time the subordinate clause deals with empirical
explanation rather than quantification, and this tends to involve an evaluative
modifier:

We conclude that platinum orientation is not adequately represented

We conclude that CTL and NK cells together play an important role

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We conclude that ifosamine is well tolerated

We conclude that MTT assay is suitable for assessing antiproliferative action
We conclude that this in vitro behaviour is meaningful

Extraposed it-clauses (adjective complement clauses) permit the researchers

to omit the research process subject of the main clause, generally involving
almost obligatory modality in the complement clauses:

It is possible that the bioavailability of BQ-123 might be different

It is possible that abnormal gene product may be involved
It is possible that P-glycoprotein may be responsible
It is possible that serine phosphorylate could play some role
It is possible that the MP modification could stabilise the... cuformation

In contrast, it is likely that involves modality, negative polarity, or some

negation of a previous result:

it seems likely that they missed the peak

it seems likely that abnormal patterns affect...
it seems likely that order and timing are not invariable
it seems likely that cell counts were not carried in HMC100 p64
it seems likely that ... alterations did not reflect the PMN population

And in further contrast it is clear that is always used in opposition to

previously negative results and introduced by adversative sentence adverbs:

Nonetheless it is clear that there are sex differences in metabolism

Nonetheless it is clear that cardiac effects are not dose limiting
Nonetheless it is clear that the glycoproteins were specifically induced
Although it is clear that TAA is not specifically induced
However it is clear that assignment is paramagnetically influenced

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The fourth main pattern for that involves embedded noun phrase
complements, and similarly demonstrates a modality projection between the
noun and its embedded verb. One of the most frequent noun phrase
complements is ‘the fact that’. The expression takes on a very specific
rhetorical role, by first stating negative results and then by setting out an
explanation:

The fact that {negative empirical observation} {explanation}

The fact that [[this enhancement does not implies that such oncogenes
occur in females]] were not involved
The fact that [[we cannot demonstrate this suggests that AIN causes
change ]] different effects...
The fact that [[the 150pp treated group was might be due to weakness in
not killed earlier]] the dose monitor
The fact that [[2 MCR lines did not show confirmed that these reagents
higher activity]] were highly specific
The fact that [[sequential accumulation of might be due to early
LOH was not observed ]] monitoring

The expression <might be due to>, as seen in the examples above, is also
related to the complex conjunction: <due to the fact that>. Here the writers
reformulate some anomaly and then explain it, while the new explanation
(which does not appear to be a reformulation of previous material) may
constitute a research result in itself:

The failure of the two mechanisms due to the fact that phenotypic
could be substituents reach complex levels at low
time intervals
These discrepancies were due to the fact that antibodycolumns
are rarely 100% efficient
The ineffectiveness of thiamine may be due to the fact that thiamine has
sizable groups present.
The unexpectedly high concordance is due to the fact that multiple immuno
processes are involved

We can see that the fact that appears to collocate across clause boundaries
with the expression due to in the following example (it also consistently
colligates with a negative expression): The fact that we cannot demonstrate
this degree may be due to insufficient sensitivity of our method. Here we can
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see reformulation at work, in that an anaphoric noun (an ‘ownerless fact’ in

Francis’s 1985 classification) introduces a subordinate clause which explains
the fact. In the case of the last example, the negative result is embedded and
the reformulation of the problem is presented as an explanation in the main
clause. The idea that a subordinate clause ‘explains’ rather than sets results
out is compatible with the semantics of the less frequent expression ‘is
explained by the fact that.’ Further proof of this is that we must thematicise
the explanation in the last example or change the formulation to ‘is the
explanation of’ as in ‘Insufficient sensitivity of our method [is the
explanation of] the fact that we cannot demonstrate this degree’.
‘Insufficient sensitivity’ can not be expressed as a negative result. This
suggests that research processes are not valid explanations and are hence not
permitted by the phraseology. The negative result / explanation pattern even
extends beyond the level of the sentence, as can be seen from the following
rather unique example (from JGM56D):

#1 We found that.. only anti B1 could #2 This is likely due to the fact that the
mediate specific cytolysis. difference is only one subclass.

The more frequent expression ‘due to’ reveals a regular pattern across
sentence boundaries in other parts of the discussion subcorpus (#1 negative
result or negative research process, #2 possible empirical explanation):

#1 Unfortunately we could not detect #2 This could be due to the instability of

enzyme activity in crude extraction that this activity in a cell-free system.
converted cis ACHO8A to the
transomer.
#1 The basis for this observed #2 It may be due to inherent differences.
diffusion ... is not readily apparent.
#1 However, control and treated levels #2 This may be due to reduction in
of mutagenicity are not significantly kinase levels.
different.
#1 Levels of mutagenicity were not #2 This may be due to reduction of
significantly different. small intestinal glucoriadas.

These examples also reveal the important reformulating role of deictic ‘this’
which is discussed later. The phraseology of The fact that differs from
alternative expressions, such as the possibility that where the embedded
clause itself contains the modalised explanation (the main clause, not shown
here, is usually an expansion of the hypothesis expressed in the embedded
complement clause):
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The possibility that the hybrid cells might have differentiated

The possibility that the chromosome changes might represent in
vitro artefacts
The possibility that B-chloro(...) may have contributed to...down
regulation
The possibility that this factor may contribute to the immuno-
reversal
The possibility that the higher p53 levels may be the result of
unusually high

This expression forms a longer phraseological unit when it is introduced by

clauses which express the modality of the proposition in terms of exclusion
from or support for a research programme:

We cannot rule out the possibility that

We should not rule out the possibility that
Not only does this result eliminate the possibility that
This does not exclude the possibility that
These studies raise the possibility that
These reports support the possibility that

A similar phraseology accompanies the NP complement ‘hypothesis that’

which is usually introduced by more positive results:

These data suggest the hypothesis that MGaa may be responsible

First evidence supports the hypothesis that ...cell lines could be more
resistant
Our observations support the hypothesis that MCChOH will occur only if
deletion...
Our observations lend the hypothesis that this might be the source of
support to... methylation
Our results are in agreement the hypothesis that the promoting agent may
with resemble..

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To summarise, we can divide the various that-complement clauses between

those which evaluate results and those which reformulate and explain results
as follows:

Evaluation: Reformulation
suggest that (+modal) indicate that
(empirical item) is that (+modal) confirmed that
conclude that (+evaluation) demonstrated that
showed that (+ neg. / modal) show that (+/- neg.)
(we) reported that (+modal) (we) reported that
it is possible that (+modal) (we) found that (+quantification)
the possibility that (+ modal) the observation that
the hypothesis that (+modal)

Negative evaluation:
it seems likely that (+neg.)
(adversative) it is clear that
the fact that (+ neg.)
(neg.) due to the fact that

Modality does not necessarily constitute evaluation: in the examples above

we find that modality in most expressions accompanies other explicit markers
of evaluation, such as evaluative modifiers. In many cases however modals
have other uses, as discussed in the entry for ‘may’, below. Another
interesting feature of the patterns is that some expressions maintain their
collocational properties (such as negative polarity) in different syntactic
patterns. In particular, the expression ‘the fact that’ is the clearest case for
arguing that the phrase has to be used where some negative result is present -
whether that negative result in an embedded clause introduced by the
expression, or in a preceding main clause (where the expression has to be
converted into a clause linker ‘due to the fact that’ ) or even in a nearby
sentence.

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2.11 THERE1 (Abstract salient word 4)

The significant use of ‘there’ in Abstracts reveals a prevalence of simple

impersonal extraposed clauses in this section of the article, most often
expressing explicit evaluation about the shape of the research articles’ results
(up, down or no change):

Existential process: Evaluated quantification:

there was no difference,
there was no significant difference,
there was a reduction in the percentage of,
there was considerable variation,
there was a transiently increased number of correlations,
there was strong correlation,
there was no change,
there was pronounced distribution,
there was decreased hepatocyte labelling,
there was a high degree of similarity.

The exclusive use of the past tense is in line with other expressions which
express new results in the research article as a whole. These expressions
typically precede highly significant items within the Abstracts subcorpus
which deal with statistical direction or relation (increased, decreased,
interval, correlated). The one or two exceptions to the pattern (qualitative
empirical items) seem to highlight the preponderance of quantitative
expressions elsewhere in Abstracts:

there were pronounced effects

there was... no complete response
there was... clearly a strong genetic predisposition...

THERE2 (Results salient word 7)

‘There’ has a role in existential clauses in Abstracts in the past tense

evaluation of change in data. This is in line with the general finding

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throughout the corpus that past tense or perfective aspect tend to correspond
to current claims in the research article, whereas the present tense is used to
express established fact or report past research. However, in Results sections
the pattern moves to the present tense (there is / are) and tends to be
embedded after NP or VP complement clauses. The most frequent pattern
involves projection, where the main clause is generally a research process
and introduces empirical observations with some degree of explicit
evaluation:

Research process Evaluation Empirical items

it appears that there are considerable differences (x10)

Topography confirmed that there are considerable correlations
it is evident that there are important differences
the fact that there are pronounced correlations
we found that there is little detectable activity
This indicates that there is no redistribution
The observation that there is normal overlap
Results show that there is some protein development

The present tense is however replaced in the collocational framework There

was ( _ ) evidence of / that. The expression is used with negative evidence or
some statement about more theoretical biochemical processes (but
interestingly not without some modifier, and the simple expression There
was evidence of… does not occur):

There was no evidence of long term toxicity

There was clear evidence of long term deterioration
There was some evidence of tumor development
There was evidence of a decreasing risk
There was evidence that...viability was compromised
There was evidence for tumor development

What phraseological principle can be postulated to explain why tense

corresponds with lexical choice in this way? One clue emerges in the
phraseology of the extraposed existential expression ‘there appeared to be’.
Researchers tend not to use this expression to signal data which are
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problematic or which present a clear contrast (often preceded by ‘Although’).

The verb appeared is consistently used as a hedging verb which collocates
with negative data (in the right-collocates):

There (x16 occurrences) appeared to be low levels of expression

Although (x7) there appeared to be very few fibroblasts...
And (x8) there appeared to be slight correlation

There is a cluster of grammatical and lexical features which coincide with the
negative ‘There appeared to be no...’ pattern:

1. Existential ‘there’.
2. Modality.
3. The use of the past tense.

Such clustering demonstrates that collocational processes extend beyond

syntagmatic word-pairs and beyond the linear ordering of constituents. This
may demonstrate that such a pattern exists as a marked form in relation to the
more prevalent present tense pattern. The present tense pattern, with its
thematicised research clause in Results sections, is a preferred way of
presenting positive results, embedded within the modalised presentation of
facts. The present tense is also used in a number of non-hedged
demonstrative references in the present tense / that-clause pattern: ‘This
shows that... This indicates that’). Generally speaking therefore, negative
results serve as an aside or as a contrast with the main argument, while the
present tense indicates that an argument is to be taken forward.

2.12 WAS1 (Abstract salient word 6)

We have seen in our discussion above that the simple past is the preferred
tense for presenting the research article’s present methodology and results.
Ironically, the present is used to introduce previous research. This appears to
conflict with previous research (Hanania and Akhtar 1985) and Malcolm’s
(1987) distinction (past for generalisations, present for specific data). In the
PSC we find that ‘was’ generally reports the research article’s {clinical}
methodology and non-quantitative {empirical process} results. In Abstract
sections, ‘was’ can be seen to have a completely phraseological role to is. In
the Abstract, there are two patterns for is:
1) There is... followed by a statement of evidence: no evidence, no
molecular evidence, no indication + that, for this, to suggest etc. (contrast the

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present tense with a negative in Abstracts, with the past tense usage in
Results).
2) Extraposed it and that-clauses: it is ...concluded, apparent, desirable,
essential, important, possible, believed, expected, likely that...followed by
explanation.

Was does not share any of these phraseological characteristics, and is instead
involved with statements of qualitative results where the subjects are either
key biochemical entities in the cell (peripherin, protein, nucleus, DNA,
glycoprotein, toxicity) or biochemical items involved with a tumour’s effect
on the metabolism (growth, weight, vasodilatation, expression). As in
Methods sections, was introduces passive participles which are often pre-
modified by a technical (biochemical) adverb:

was metabolically expressed

was immunologically reacted
was enzymatically deaminated
was induced
was carried

However, the majority of passives in the abstract are more empirical or

research-oriented and resemble passives in Results sections: was + {research
process} [ordered by frequency].... observed, found, detected, determined,
studied, seen, shown, investigated, demonstrated, performed, established,
confirmed, compared.

WAS2 (Methods salient word 2)

Was / were have a relative consistent phraseology across the corpus, although
in the expression There was / there were a different phraseology emerges in
Results sections (as discussed above). The significance of was in Methods
sections stems fairly straightforwardly from the prevalence of the passive in
the past tense description of biochemical and empirical observations. Verbs
used in the passive have very fixed collocational uses. A particularly frequent
pattern emerges with ‘detection’ which tends to be either <carried out at>
{measurement item}’ or ‘accomplished + {method}’:

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detection was carried out at [X] mm (several instances)

detection was accomplished using amplified PCR
detection was accomplished using fluorescence differentials
detection was accomplished using fluorescence techniques
detection was carried out by the fluorescence model

When the verb is ‘analyze’ the method is a statistical model:

the result was analysed using the t-test

this [set of data] was analysed using the general linear model
correlation of the assay group was analysed using Student’s t-test

When the verb is ‘determined’ the method is a type of ‘assay’:

transferase activity was determined using a commercially available immunoassay

kit
the structure was determined using a reverse-phase chromatographic assay
MAKIII expression was then determined using the isotope-dilution assay
the reference range was determined using 43 pharmokinetic assays

When the verb is ‘performed’ the methodology can be a statistical or

measurement-related item:

This analysis was performed using exponentially growing cells

while our analysis was performed using infrared spectroscopy
clinical determination of the title performed using an inverted microscope
compound was
baseline calculation was performed using the t-test
cell line count was performed using the Mann Whitney test

The repetitive nature of some of the methodological details in the corpus also
reveals a number of fixed expressions (and even idiosyncratic idioms)
involving ‘was’. The following examples are common to several different
texts, although of course there is also much repetition within the same text:

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the solvent was removed under reduced pressure (x5 instances).

the solution was run on the plates for the analysis (x5 instances).
the supernatant was transferred to a new fraction (x6 instances, plus
variants).
temperature was maintained at (measurement) degrees C. (x7
instances plus variants)
the reference range for (drug (measurement x) nmol. (x5 instances)
X) was

The plural ‘were’ tends to be used with plural biochemical entities (mice,
cells, controls etc.) ‘{biochemical entities} were {clinical process verb} by’.
Singular items on the other hand tend to have the following formulation:
‘{usually deictic} {empirical / research process} was {clinical / empirical
process verb}. Thus singular and plural forms of the verb tend to coincide
with different semantic verb classes.

2.13 WE1 (Introduction salient word 8)

A rich set of alternative expressions emerges when the research article

writers present their own previous or current research. The Introduction,
together with Discussion sections, appears to be the privileged location for
self-reference and overt justification of research goals. In many of the
expressions referring to ‘we’ there are time expressions or deictic references
to the writing process. These appear to vary systematically according to the
choice of verb and circumstantial adjuncts:

Here we compare production in sheep

Here we compare expression of gene alpha
Here we compare spectra

In this study we examine a combination of methods

in the present study we examine the activity of PKC (x2)
in a subsequent study we examine the incidence of protein

These time expressions may have a role in situating a present tense verb
because the unmarked meaning of the present in articles is more usually to
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report ‘past’ research or established facts. More frequently however, the

researchers refer to themselves or to a generic audience (using we) in the
perfective aspect (a form of present tense time reference but indicating
‘recent past’ research). This perfective pattern is complex but essentially
contains the following recurrent elements: (time reference) {reference to this
study / paper /report} we have {research process}:

<Recently> we have found that

Previously we have investigated whether
<In this paper> we have investigated reactive effects
In a previous paper we have investigated other protonated
In this study we have reported (x3)
In a previous report we have determined
In this report we have shown that

We have <recently been studying>

We have previously reported that mutant p53
causes
We have recently shown that (x3)
We have previously studied p53 expression
We have previously succeeded in catenating

We have <in this study> studied NAK cell

susceptibility
We have in this report studied tumour-drug
distribution
We have in this paper succeeded in establishing
We have in this study succeeded in establishing
ph1-p

Generally speaking, when the research process is described by a

metacomment (investigation, report, study), the sentence adverb as theme is
placed sentence initially. When the verb is more technical or linked to
specific empirical processes, the adverbial element is placed after the finite
verb as a specifier of the technical verb. This is particularly clear with the
verb ‘report’ which is exclusively used in the simple present tense with
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specific technical results or observed biochemical processes: we {time

reference} {research process} {reference ‘here’} (that) {results}:

we now report that p53 overexpression is elevated in the presence of

we now report that epoxyalcohol also inhibits
we now report the results of our immunological studies
we report here the results of a physical study
we report here the results of our study
we report here that 2DDP-subclones
we report that growth in soft agar appears to involve.. substitution
we report the synthesis of 3 substituted pyramidizole
we report first isolation and characterisation
we report characterisation of a new breast cancer cell line
we report 2 different approaches to synthesis

WE2 (Discussion salient word 9)

The researchers’ reference to ‘we’ in Discussion sections is associated with

cognitive research process (we conclude, we believe, we consider) whereas in
the Introduction we tends to be used with ‘research writing’ processes to do
with actions (present, succeeded, compare). This difference corresponds to
our data on action-oriented ‘to’ clauses which are more typical of
Introductions than propositional ‘that’ clauses (generally related to mental
process verbs). In addition, ‘we’ is subject of the following present perfect
forms:

we have demonstrated, described, designed, detected, determined, developed,

employed, established, examined, extended, found, identified, investigated,
obtained, observed, noted, reported, shown, suggested, summarized, used.

Of these, employed, extended and used can be classed as clinical processes

(on the basis of: we have used clonogenic assays to quantify...). More
generally, writers tend to use ‘cognitive’ verbs when assessing negative
results. Each verb however has a specific phraseology. For example, the
result-specific ‘we conclude that’ pattern technically rephrases an empirical
result, while ‘we believe that’ extrapolates and explains the outcome.

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We conclude that… reformulation of results:

#1 A number of other approaches have #2 We conclude that energy group

addressed the assignment of change. effects are not overwhelming.
#1 T cells and NAK cells are essential #2 We conclude that CTL and NAK
for rejection. cells play an important role in the
rejection of LAC-IL2 cells.
#1 The validation coefficient decreased #2 We conclude that ... the dose
from 6.3% to 6.4% expressed... does not contribute
significantly.
#1 The result .. did not reveal a #2 We conclude that OS may affect the
significant shift. movement of PMNs.
#1 Neither position band was detected. #2 We conclude that the glycoproteins..
are specifically recognised...

We believe that…evaluation of results:

#1 The cellular basis for this association #2 but we believe that comparing this in
is unknown, vivo... is meaningful.
#1 Even if methylene does not interact #2 we believe that the magnitude is not
with hepatocyte... sufficient.
#1 The reasons for the discrepancy are #2 but we believe that our technique of
not entirely clear, assessing transport... offers greater
sensitivity.
#1 The relative LI’s did not differ #2 We believe that methylene-chloride
between methylene-exposed controls. exposure did not provide a selective
growth advantage.
#1 The role of the negative phosphate #2 We believe that improved progress
backbone... is poorly characterized at can be made to enhance understanding in
present. areas such as chemical drug design.

Thus expressions introduced by We conclude that can (as the verb promises)
stand as a summary of the main empirical observations. Expressions
introduced by We believe that are not representative of the results but signal
the perceived significance of the research in the eyes of the researchers.

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3. The Phraseology of Research Article Sections

The data presented in the previous section set out the distribution of uses of
single grammatical items as they are used in the research article. While most
of the observations signal departures from predominant usage in the general
language, certain features of language can be seen to vary relatively
systematically from one grammatical item to the next. This was seen to
particularly affect such general grammatical features such as verbal polarity,
tense and complementation, clausal extraposition and projection and complex
nominal modification. Grammatical items can also be seen to have consistent
patterns in terms of semantic clusters and collocational sets and reveal
consistent correlations between lexical or grammatical form and such
discourse features as modality. Such data also suggest varying range of usage
from one rhetorical section of the article to another. This section of the book
explores this theme in more detail, by examining the specific role of
grammatical items which are found to be statistically salient in one section of
the article alone. I also set out here the statistics used to identify the
grammatical items examined in the previous section (this data is also
included in the Appendices).

3.1 Titles

There are only 2300 words in the PSC titles subcorpus. To study phraseology
in Titles a larger control corpus was needed and so the Medline electronic
database was searched for a diskfull of 572 titles relating to cancer (1 626
words) and, for comparison, their Abstracts were also analysed (58
332words) as detailed in section III.6. However, the items we analyse in the
control corpus are determined by what is found to be salient in the PSC. The
Wordlist programme gives the following data (in the same format as
discussed in Section 2.6 above):

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Table 11: Title salient grammatical items from the Wordlist program

Rank Word PSC Titles % PSC % in Chi Proba

Freq. in Freq. corpus sq. bility=
subcorpus
12 OF 166 (7.6%) 21309 (4.3%) 59.3 0.000
60 FOR 110 (5.0%) 5224 (1.0%) 26.6 0.000
67 ON 24 (1.1%) 2182 (0.4%) 20.5 0.000
70 AND 99 (4.6%) 14610 (2.9%) 19.7 0.000
134 IN 91 (4.2%) 14349 (2.9%) 12.9 0.000

A Wordlist comparison of the Medline Titles corpus and their corresponding

Abstracts reveals similar data for grammatical items: of, on, and, in, by, via,
its, together with the marginally grammatical self (in relation to self-analysis
techniques for breast cancer). Most of these items have been analysed above,
and only the item on remains.

3.11 TITLE salient word 3: On

‘On’ occurs in expressions that are either the topic of research or the
application of a specific empirical process. A limited set of items introduce
on, and its typical left-collocates have been listed under ‘of’ above (disease
related items):

{Research processes}: {Empirical processes}

a retrospective study on effect
Basic study on influence
Clinical study on impact

In Titles ‘on’ is also a key element in fixed modifying expressions which add
embedded information about methodology, as in {research process 1} based
on {research process 2 / clinical process}:

{Empirical process} {Research process}

design for pilot studies based on lab data

lymphatic studies based on a clinicopathological study
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flow in carcinoma based on anatomic manner of extension

design methodology based on NMR combined spectroscopy

On is less involved in complex nominals than ‘of’ and ‘for’. As mentioned in

our discussion of and and of (both Title-salient items) prepositions such as on
are largely determined by the widespread use of lexical items such as effect.
The collocational relation between effect and on can be seen to operate
regardless of complement or modifier roles, especially when the item ‘effect’
is seen to govern a prepositional complement phrase:

1 The effect of surgical intervention and neck cancer on whole salivary flow.
(Modifier of effect)
2 Blood transfusion does not have adverse effect on survival after operations for
colorectal cancer. A pilot study. (Complement of effect).

In #1, the prepositional phrase can be inserted before the presumed

complement phrase *introduced by of). The proximity of effect and on in #2
suggests that ‘on’ belongs to a complement phrase (if no other material can
intervene in that position), in which case after is candidate for introducing a
modifier. In either case, if ‘effect’ is seen to introduce ‘on’ then a
collocational relation appears to be valid across phrase boundaries.

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3.2 Abstracts

There are 29 136 words in the PSC Abstracts subcorpus. The Wordlist data
reveal the following salient words:

Table 12: Abstract salient grammatical items from the Wordlist program

RANK WORD PSC % PSC % Chi sq Probability

Abstracts in Freq. in
Freq subcorpu corpus
s
31 BUT 67 (0.2%) 663 (0.1%) 18.1 0.000
43 THESE 119 (0.4%) 1399 (0.3%) 15.3 0.000
79 OF 1367 (4.7%) 21309 (4.3%) 11.8 0.001
198 THERE 40 (0.1%) 444 6.5 0.011
203 IN 912 (3.1%) 14349 (2.9%) 6.3 0.012
267 WAS 365 (1.3%) 6271 (1.2%) 5.0 0.020
299 THAT 227 (0.8%) 3357 (0.7%) 4.5 0.034
329 DID 34 (0.1%) 395 4.3 0.037
334 WHO 14 129 4.2 0.040
378 BOTH 55 (0.2%) 713 (0.1%) 3.7 0.055

The salient lexical items of Abstracts are largely disease-related entities

(mammary, tumor) or cellular processes (expression, induced). In particular,
important processes involving tumor growth appear to be the most frequent
items in the abstract (heterozygocity, growth, expression, active, cancer).
Equally relevant from the first 100 significant lexical words are items
indicating a general description of the shape of the data rather than the
methods (correlated, decreased, increased, interval, level) and verbs which
report past research (studied, suggest). This tendency is borne out by the
phraseology, as we have seen above for items such as of, there, in, was, that,
did, The following four salient items are uniquely significant in Abstracts
sections, and confirm the general tendency for embedded expansion (in
clauses and phrases) and quantitative reporting.

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3.21 ABSTRACT salient word 1: But

The very high significance of but (compared with other grammatical items in
Abstracts) suggests that the reporting of negative results is a fundamental
characteristic of Abstracts. Positive results are announced in a first clause and
then qualified. In particular ‘but’ is an explicit signal of reversal and
evaluation of the direction of quantifiable results (up, down or stable):

but displayed no significant reduction...

but this also fell...
but decreased sharply...
but restabilized...
but adjusted to milder in vitro expression...

Subjects of clauses introduced by but are all related to the measurement of

the efficiency of drugs (items include resistance, efficacy, immune response).
In Results sections on the other hand, we find that the tendency is to explain
negative results using adversatives which introduce hypotactic clauses rather
than co-ordinating conjunctions (however...X did not correspond, although
this did not result in...). As we have seen above, in Abstracts report and
quantify negative data whereas Results expand on and qualify them.

3.22 ABSTRACT salient word 2: These

‘This’ serves as a determiner (in rephrasing, or reformulation) or as a deicitic

pronoun to refocus information from one clause to the next. This function is
shared by Discussion sections and a more detailed analysis is seen in our
discussion of ‘this’ below. We note here that ‘these’ in Abstracts differs from
‘this’ in that almost half of the occurrences of these are as pronouns
introduced by of, while ‘this’ is mostly a determiner. The anaphoric referents
of these tend to be very specific disease-related items (carcinogenic factors,
leucocytes, oncogenes, metastases) and items that introduce of are items of
measurement (half of these, the majority of these, concentrations of these) a
pattern that coincides with similar (but infrequent) patterns for of (see
previous section). Abstracts therefore tend to favour the use of deictic
encapsulation (pointing to single items) as opposed to reformulation (a
process seen in Discussion sections, where this and these are determiners of
longer noun phrases rather than single pronouns). The high significance of

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these (according to Appendix C2) here also coincides with Nwogu and
Bloor’s (1991) observation that abstracts tend to employ simple thematic
progression, linearly converting rheme to theme.

3.23 ABSTRACT salient word 9: Who

The relative pronoun who is prime evidence of embedding in Abstracts (also

seen in the pronominal use of that). Who refers to the only participants other
than the researchers (we) mentioned in the corpus: patients and analogous
terms such as physiological group, those... Consequently, relative clauses
introduced by who deal with the role of patients as subjects (in the
grammatical and clinical sense) who are seen as active recipients of research,
rather than objects to be experimented on:

subjects who receive active management

patients who had received active management
% of those who had taken aspirin,
subjects who took part in radiation studies
patients who showed positive response to the administration of AZT
those who progressed slowly
cancer patients who succumbed
patients who had tumours,

In particular, patients are never given drugs (a passive expression), they

receive them (who receive carboplasmin, receive Doxo, receive doxorubicin).
This may be legal requirement or a deliberate euphemistic avoidance (unlike
mice, patients must be willing recipients of drugs) – although the consistency
of the expression in the corpus and the fact that science writers are not aware
of such conventions suggest that we are dealing with a very dominant
scientific ‘voice’. This is also quite a clear example of the way phraseology
helps to shape a specific view of transitivity at the same time as framing
terms stereotypically. For example, given that all object complements of the
verb ‘receive’ are drug treatments, the non-initiate observer is compelled to
assign a similar semantic profile to the terms active physiological
management and administration. The phraseology of the term management
(the 46th most frequent term in the corpus) allows us to establish its meaning
within the corpus not only as very different to ‘organisation of personnel’ but

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as part of a larger, recurrent transitive structure involving patients and

‘receiving’ - the preferred phraseology for the experimental application of
drugs in vivo. While ‘take part in’ and ‘receive’ are the most common
formulations after ‘who’, the same phraseology is not reserved for the other
participants in the process. Animals tend to be ‘given’ drugs, so we find
(especially in the methods section) ‘mice were exposed to / were fed / were
given...’. We did find, however, one instance of mice infelicitously ‘taking
part’ in an experiment:

mice who took part in the control study were given doxorubicin based
analogues.

3.24 ABSTRACT salient word 10: Both

‘Both’ signals a noun group complex, another possible characteristic of

‘compaction’ in Abstracts. In many of the cases where ‘both’ is used as a
linking conjunction, it is a redundant signal of a following conjunction. The
following sentence is typical:

Two antibodies that inhibited both anchorage dependent and anchorage

independent growth also blocked...

As mentioned in our discussion of and above, ‘both’ is considered necessary

by the researcher to emphasise two complementary alternatives, thus
establishing a basic taxonomy. In Abstracts we find the following
oppositions:

both accelerate and delay,

pre-B early cells
high low secretors
mouse human
rats mice
cytosolic particulate functions
oxidative reductive metabolism
destructive regenerative processes

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normal tumor cells

Both appears to signal a paradoxical relationship between two terms at

extreme ends of a scale, establishing at the same time the limits of the scale
(short range: from mice to rats, or long range: from normal to tumor cells).
By using such expressions in Abstracts, the writers signal a broad and
inclusive data set to be compared in the research article.

3.3 Introductions

The PSC introductions subcorpus contains 59 724 words. The Wordlist

comparison with the PSC gives the following data:

Table 13: Introduction salient grammatical items from the Wordlist

program

RANK WORD Abstracts % PSC % Chi sq. Probab

Freq. in Freq. in ility=
subcorpus whole
corpus
3 BEEN 346 (0.6%) 966 (0.2%) 341.1 0.000
4 HAS 283 (0.5%) 741 (0.1%) 310.3 0.000
5 HAVE 359 (0.6%) 1127 (0.2%) 285.4 0.000
7 IS 643 (1.1%) 3169 (0.6%) 156.3 0.000
11 SUCH 113 (0.2%) 388 73.7 0.000
15 CAN 120 (0.2%) 468 58.1 0.000
18 IT 207 (0.3%) 1006 (0.2%) 52.2 0.000
19 WE 200 (0.3%) 972 (0.2%) 50.4 0.000
25 OF 2874 (4.8%) 21309 (4.3%) 41.4 0.000
32 TO 1233 (2.1%) 8631 (1.7%) 36.6 0.000

The phraseology of these items indicates a general tendency for extraposed

projections (clauses of action and hypothesis), the relational expression of
technical facts, the reporting of previous research and the present signaling of
research goals. The lexical properties of Introductions are considerably more
complex that those of Titles and Abstracts and, generally speaking, the

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phraseology of Introductions is distinctly unlike that of the rest of the

research article.

3.31 INTRODUCTION salient word 1: been.

‘Been’ is used in two types of perfective passive construction which have

been identified as typical in the reporting genre of Introductions (Salager-
Meyer 1992). We have seen many of the phraseological properties of the
perfective in our discussion of have (above). The passive perfect appears to
polarise around a semantic difference between research process verbs
introduced by a biochemical / empirical subject and verbs which indicate a
new or prevailing theoretical model in extraposed clauses:
1) {biochemical entity or research process} (has / have) been {research
process verb} in order of frequency >10: reported, shown, demonstrated,
found, observed, identified, studied, described, obtained, published,
conducted, detected, investigated. However, this ‘report’ pattern also
involves three empirical process verbs: used, implicated, associated.
2) it has been (in order of frequency >10: shown, suggested, proposed,
established, postulated, concluded) that. These are also research process
verbs as we have defined them above, but they also tend to be mental or
verbal processes (Halliday’s terms) and refer more to the research activity of
the discourse community than to that of the authors. The whole pattern is
termed a ‘research utterance’.
The verb ‘shown’ appears in both lists, and I claim below that it has a
different distribution to other verbs. However, the most significant right-
collocate of been with 40 occurrences is reported in the following
phraseology: (biochemical process} has/have been reported to (+
quantification clause}:

p53 gene resistance has been reported to be very frequent

drug resistance has been reported to be different in 2 case
studies
antigen mechanisms has been reported to be frequently
carcinogenic
the LOH mechanism has been reported to cause significant
immunological damage
S-transferases has been reported to produce metastasis in
several species

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A less frequent but similar phraseology involves reported in (+quantification

phrase}:

gene inactivation has been reported in a number of cancers

MP substitution has been reported in a high percentage of
carcinomas
LOH from 18q has been reported in several human cancers
low effects of has been reported in many tissues
inhibition
drug resistance has been reported in mammals treated with
PIMO

This appears to be a typical pattern for other research process verbs

(observed, described, detected). When we analyse the empirical / relational
process associated in the same global pattern, the expression relates tell-tale
signs of cancer to causes: {biochemical process} have been associated with
{cancer Y}:

Retroviruses has/ have been associated with hepatic cancer

Ras gene has/ have been associated with specific neoplasia
high doses of toxin has/ have been associated with gastrointestinal
bleeding
mutation in these genes has/ have been associated with haemic neoplasms
its effects on human health has/ have been associated with the occurrence of
cancer

While this may appear to be unremarkable, it has to be remembered that

quantification is a possible pattern with associated but is simply not used. A
similar pattern is seen with implicated except that the pattern is: {biochemical
process} have been implicated in {disease-related process Y} and the
disease-related item is more specific than in the associated with pattern:

...have been implicated in... regulating cell differentiation

...have been implicated in... in the development of cancer
...have been implicated in... the t-programming process

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The third exceptional empirical report in the first pattern has a unique
phraseology, involving a statement about a general research model or
technique as subject:

This model has been (widely) used...

animal models... which have been utilized....
This type of assay has been used...
the macrolide technique has been used...
A cross-characterisation has been utilized....
technique

Utilized is mostly interchangeable with used but is less frequent:

... have been used/ utilized to study / evaluate / prepare... {biochemical X}

... have been used for other TCNQ derivatives
... have been utilized for the commercial production of citric acid
... have been used as a guide in the primary study
... have been utilized as chiral auxiliaries in a variety of assays

The difference between the two verbs is that in only follows utilized :

... have been utilized in industrial settings

... have been utilized in combination chemotherapy
... have been utilized in a recent synthesis
... have been utilized in the delivery of amines
... have been utilized in cancer therapy

Such differences imply an extra level of phraseology available for this

expression, and may indicate the effects of American English on the general
phraseology of the corpus.
The clauses introduced by the second major pattern (extraposed + research
utterance) have a less technical semantic scope than those in the first and
generally express some empirical relational clause (X is associated with /
involved with Y). The projected clause is a past result framed in terms of a
new (present tense) research direction (the following examples are listed in
order of right-collocate frequency):
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it has been proposed that this transformation involves DNA damage

it has been established that they are reactive with the extracelluar domain of
p185
it has been postulated that the mitogenic effect of estrogens are mediated
it has been concluded that MP substitution is a significant tumorigenic
factor.
it has been suggested that thyamine is involved in the development of
prostatic cancer.

I suggested above that collocational patterns are not due solely to the
grammatical preferences of lexical elements (in this case verbs) but to a
general semantic ‘meaning’ that the collocational framework embodies. A
clear example of this can be seen with ‘show’. Since ‘show’ appears to fit
semantically into several categories of verb (empirical and research-oriented)
it is perhaps no accident that it is the sole verb to be used in both the passive
perfect ‘reporting’ pattern and the extraposed ‘research utterance’ pattern.
Furthermore, its use does not quite coincide with other verbs in terms of
phraseology and lexical collocation. In the first pattern (24 instances), the
expression introduces non-finite clauses in the same way as the verb report.
In this case, however, the clause does not present quantitative results (found
exclusively after has been reported to) but more qualitative findings:

the disease has been shown to have considerable

resistance to
TNF alpha has been shown to efficiently deliver the
toxicity of ricin
a structural analogue of histidine has been shown to provoke an immune
response
Quercetin, a lipoxygenase inhibitor has been shown to exhibit antitumour
activity in vitro
encapsulation of dXR... has been shown to act as an in vitro
inducer

The extraposed pattern for show is similar to other verbs such as establish,
which introduce an explanation rather than a specific quantifiable result. The
difference with other verbs lies in the choice of clause complex, and show is
used almost exclusively in thematically prominent subordinate clauses
introduced by Although:
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Although it has been the murine p53 used in all of these studies was
shown that mutated, its mechanisms are not fully understood.
Although it has been p53 gene constructs with many different point
shown that mutations, the gene responsible for the two cancers
has not been identified.
Although it has been the hepatocytes are critical to the survival of the
shown that tumor, .... no correlation has been previously
determined...
Although it has been the cells that mediate cancer induced GVHD,
shown that structural studies of the enzymes have yet to be
published.

Show is thus used almost exclusively to present contradictory evidence which

has not yet been published. These sentences are a clear case of consistency
of use, and demonstrate that collocational behaviour extends beyond the level
of the clause. We can see that the expression ‘it has been shown that’ has a
specific phraseology but is not incompatible with the other research
utterances. It plays a marginally different role to these expressions, and
writers choose it to distance themselves from the possibly more subjective
‘cognitive’ verbs of the same phraseology. Why should the extraposed show
+ that clause be limited to signaling gaps in the research record? It may be
that the semantics of the verb ‘show’ are sufficiently vague and non-emphatic
(as opposed to proposed, concluded, established, suggested). This allows the
writer(s) to suggest a framework in which the wider discourse community
has no agreed fixed position on previous findings (neither proven nor
rejected).

3.32 INTRODUCTION-salient word 2: Has.

As with ‘have’ and ‘been’, ‘has’ plays a key role in the phraseology of report,
taxonomy and evaluation. ‘Has been’ accounts for 60% (188/284) of the
instances of ‘has’, and this usage is detailed above. The remaining phrases
using this item are collocational frameworks with ‘of’: have the _ of’ in
which the whole expression functions as an attributive relational process:

has the advantage of

has the benefit of

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has the characteristic of

There are also a number of instances of impersonal reporting in which the

phraseological pattern is: {clinical approach or technique) has received
{quantification of research process} attention / investigation followed by a
reformulation of the clinical process:

combined NMR therapy has received little investigation on a clinical basis

PIMO antigen has received little investigation as a factor in this disease
intracellular solvoyosis has received little attention as a possible treatment
interferon has received much attention as potential cure for cancer
C1350 has received particular attention as a possible source of
metabolic data.

As seen elsewhere in the corpus, the relational or possessive use of ‘has’ also
involves overt evaluation:

the inhibitor has a profound effect on its structure

the factor has a peak incidence between...
the disease has a broad spectrum of clinical indications

3.33 INTRODUCTION salient word 5: such.

The expression ‘such as’ is a discourse marker reformulating items in a

taxonomic way. The most frequent reformulations are of biochemical
processes (agents, enzymes and tumours) where the reformulation
demonstrates the conventional notation or chemical nomenclature for the
superordinate chemical type:

antitumour agents such as NMU

alkylating agents such as BCNV
carcinogenic agents such as nitromidazoles
other agents such as TCPOB-08

use of hormonal enzymes such as dismutase

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several DNA enzymes such as exonuclease

metabolic enzymes such as transferase
detoxifying enzymes such as acetates

tumors such as Wilm’s melanoma

tumors such as maleic myeloma
tumors such as the adenocarcinoma
tumors such as MCF-7

The reformulation appears to be bi-directional: the first item can be a new

item, while the complex preposition ‘such as’ introduces a reference to a
previously mentioned specific item. In this case, the textual function ‘given’
or ‘new’ does not determine word order, the phraseology (superordinate)
such as (hyponym) remains the same. The ‘new superordinate / given
hyponym’ reading of this pattern is not listed for this expression by the
Cobuild dictionary, and it is plausible that particular uses of set expressions
like this undergo slight shifts of use in technical writing. What is clear,
however, is the function of rephrasing (reformulation) which confirms that
this is a fundamental mechanism in report writing and explanation in
Introductions. This also occurs in a slightly different form to Discussions:
reformulation in Abstracts and Introductions can be seen to ‘refocus’ single
items, while Discussions sections reformulate items as more generic terms.

3.34 INTRODUCTION salient word 6: can.

‘Can’ expresses potential empirical procedures or biochemical processes.

The verb essentially signals a reduced form of claim. Two patterns emerge,
either in research oriented passive constructions or in active technical
expressions:

2) {General clinical or empirical process} can be {research / empirical

process }:

alterations can be prepared applied

variants can be deciphered prevented
ideas can be correlated determined
methods can be considered classified
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therapies can be attributed derived

products can be obtained

Some technical biochemical processes are also used in this expression:

transmitted, modulated, coupled, induced.

3) {Specific biochemical process / item} can {technical biochemical

process}:

gene products can dimerize

cytokines can flip
IL-2 can hydrolyse
differentiated cells can induce
gingivalis can undergo malignant transformation
DNA can metabolise
PMEA can inhibit

In Introductions, at least, the passive is not used to express clinical or

technical biochemical processes. This trend is reversed in Methods sections,
as we have seen for was / were above.

3.45 INTRODUCTION salient word 7: It.

Most of the uses of ‘it’ have been described in the discussion of ‘it is’ and ‘it
has been’ + {research process} above. While the present tense is the
preferred tense in Introductions, with the verbs found, thought (x3),
reasoned, reported, shown the extraposed passive is expressed in the past
tense:

it was also found that the polymer was not stable

it was found that it causes higher overall cell counts
it was found that although stability outside the cell...

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‘It’ is the most Cobuild-salient word in the corpus. The Astec ‘Common’
program shows that in relative frequency (not actual frequency), it is nearly
five times more likely to occur in the Cobuild corpus than in the PSC (the
ratio is 20: 112 per 1000) and this would indicate that extraposed clauses are
a prototypical characteristic of Introductions rather than the rest of corpus.
Extraposed active clauses (in that) are however overtaken in Introductions by
the use of non-finite extraposed to-clauses, such as evaluative research
utterances (it is essential to etc.) and it would be worthwhile to. Such action-
oriented phrases are described below.

3.36 INTRODUCTION salient word 10: To.

Generally speaking, the prevalence of to in Introductions is indicative of a

preference for action-oriented clauses as opposed to cognitive ‘mental’
process clauses. Such a distinction was first observed from concordance data
by Johns and King (1993) in the general language. In the PSC, ‘it is
important to’ and ‘have been reported to are followed by specific findings or
empirical events. This can be contrasted with present tense or modal
expressions such as: it appears that, and it would seem that which tend to
introduce hypotheses and explanations (as seen under been above: to clauses
such as has been shown to are more frequent than has been shown that). The
most frequent use of ‘to’ as complementizer is in projecting cleft clauses
which formulate the aims of the research paper, a key expression in
Introductions sections. We have already seen ‘This aim of this study was to’
in our discussion of of, however the variety of expression we find with < was
to > goes well beyond this simple formulation:

The aim of this study was to compare

The intention was to determine
One further goal was to evaluate
The key to the plan was to examine
Therefore our second objective was to expand data
their policy was to examine
Our purpose was to explore whether
Another goal of these studies was to identify DNA adducers
The aim of the present series of these studies was to investigate
The present study’s aim was to investigate whether

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The goal of this study was to re-evaluate

A main task was to study whether
Thus, the first aim of the present study was to test
The purpose of the Bristol 3rd stage trail was to use
The purpose of this work was to widen the research window.
(Exception: The purpose of the current report was to generate and trap...)

The only permanent elements of the phraseology here are the grammatical
items ‘was to’, and the semantics of the surrounding clusters is highly
consistent: {research goal} was to {research process verb}. The only
exception to this seems to be where the aim is to act in a specific
methodology, for example the clinical process ‘generate and trap’. This may
seem unsurprising, but the important point about phraseology is that perfectly
plausible alternatives such as ‘to generate and trap’ are not equally as
prevalent as the research process expressions: they are exceptions. There is
no logical reason why the potential expression {research goal} was to
{empirical / clinical process} should not occur just as frequently in the
corpus. In the case of Introductions, goals are presented as global research
rather than the specific empirical or clinical processes. A possible corollary is
that what would be free or restricted collocation in the general language
becomes fixed either one way or another in the specific language because of
such overriding rhetorical constraints.
However, this does not exhaust the role of to as complementizer in noun
group projections in other salient expressions in Introductions. One
particularly regular projecting clause takes the form: {biochemical process:
possessive} ability to {biochemical process}:

[the reactant] its ability to alter tolerance to self

we extended its [tumor] ability to differentiate
calibrating their [leukocytes] ability to modify factor specific
DNA
exemplified by its [Xpa3] ability to undergo epoxidation

In some cases, adjective complement clauses reflect more typical verb

complement patterns. ‘Able to’, for example can have animate subjects {the
researchers} with the following pattern: (we are/were) able to {research
process}:

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we were able to compare the patterns

we are able to confirm that...
if we were able to design an interim system
we are not yet able to give a definitive statement
In 16 cases we were able to identify the structural defects

or inanimate biochemical subjects with the following pattern: {biochemical

process / entity} (be) able to {biochemical process}:

agents that are able to down regulate

gangliosides are able to function as
human IL2 is not able to induce an immune response
the most potent of these is not able to maintain cAK III
The...analogous tumor was also able to metastasize.

This phraseological distinction {research oriented / biochemical oriented} is

also strikingly reflected in the tense patterns of one verb: ‘lead to’ where the
past tense is used for the research oriented pattern:

These observations led to comparative studies

these findings led to widespread use of hormonal aspects
Identification of ...cell led to the investigation of radioimmunization
response
we describe the rationale led to speculation that 5HT3 receptors...
which
These results led to the selection of a battery of immune assays

While the present tense is exclusively used for the biochemical / technical
pattern (and can be seen to be used in reporting of results):

response to DNA damage leads to an arrest of the cells

This in turn leads to increased conversion of the lactase
This process leads to inhibition of intracellular concentrations
altered membrane leads to degradation extracelluar matrix (ECM)
transport

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the agonist 2-methyl 5HT leads to release of substance P

This appears to confirm our findings elsewhere that tense and aspect play a
role in phraseology (we see elsewhere that it does for is / was / have been).
Rather than representing a stance in relation to past and present (current)
research, the past tense appears to correspond to research-oriented
observations (relating to the overt mental or verbal activities of the
researchers) while the present corresponds to biochemical and empirical
observations (covert activity on the part of the researchers).
I have mentioned above that projected ‘to-clauses’ (such as the very
frequent have been found to, designed to) are characteristic of Introductions
while projected ‘that-clauses’ (The possibility that, it has been found that)
become are preferred in Abstracts and Discussions. This may reflect an
increased use of indirect grammatical metaphor later on in the text. In
Introductions, for example mental research processes (in the passive) project
explanatory clauses impersonally:

cells are known to bind p53

chemicals are known to cause embryotoxicity
enzymes are known to inhibit hepatic MFO activity
hydrolysis are known to proceed via a 2-step reaction
proteins are known to repair the 6-0 methylguanin

If we look at the long range phraseology of the most frequent of these

expressions ‘appears to’ we see that it is generally used in conjunction with a
negative statement, or a statement that contradicts an accompanying clause:

Although the regulation of MyoD1 is not appears to perform critical functions.

fully understood, this
However, the function of p52... does not appear to stimulate DNA
synthesis directly.
Many tumours appear to have no relation to DNT
oncogenic viruses
However, this appears to contradict some of our
preliminary observations.
It appears to be an ubiquitous protein,
although there is no correlation...

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The phraseology of ‘appears to’ seems to be linked not with ‘hedging’ of

assertions, as one might expect, but with signalling contradiction, tied in with
negative subordinate clauses. It is also worth noting that the negative which
accompanies adversatives like ‘Although’ seems to operate in parallel with
‘appears that’ and comes either in the main or subordinate clause: it is as if
the phraseology requires a negative expression but has no preference about
where it is finally expressed. Again, one explanation for this variation may be
that phraseology determines what lexico-grammatical choices are available,
with the final mechanism of thematic choice and word order left to textual
considerations.
Finally, the prepositional use of ‘to’ accounts for only half of its
occurrences in Introductions whereas it becomes prevalent in Methods
sections. In particular we note its use in the adjunct: according to + research
model (in vitro criteria, soliton theory, the theory of Knudson (1985), the
mechanism we put forth, tumor histology (Palmer et al. 1988)), phrasal verbs,
as with the very frequent compared to + biochemical process, and
complements of biochemical nominals which take -to-, such as the frequent
‘resistance to chemotherapy’. A longer phraseological unit emerges with the
nominal {empirical process} {emprical premodifier} exposure to
{biochemical entity}:

(drug X) was increased following short exposure to TNF and other solvents
term
(drug X) undergoes induction involving exposure to high concentrations of TNF
Studies have demonstrated permeability
following exposure to non-toxic doses
industrial exposure to methylene chloride
human exposure to higher concentrations
occupational exposure to benzocaine

Other nominal constructions normally use ‘to’ phrases as a comparator, very

often involving ‘cells’ and another biochemical, often a reagent ‘growth
factor’:

responses of cells to a wide variety of mitogenic growth factors

resistance of cells to growth factors
susceptibility of cells to hormones in growth factor

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responsiveness of cells to oestrogens

similarity of cells to the antibody

3.4 METHODS sections

The PSC Methods subcorpus contains 137161 words. The Wordlist

comparison with the PSC gives the following data:

Table 14: Methods salient grammatical items from the Wordlist program

RANK WORD PSC % PSC % Chi sq. Probab

Methods in Freq in whole ility=
Freq subcorpus corpus
1 WERE 2795 (2.0%) 5162 (1.0%) 876.5 0.000
3 WAS 2877 (2.1%) 6146 (1.2%) 576.7 0.000
18 THEN 282 (0.2%) 420 142.9 0.000
20 AT 1324 (1.0%) 3287 (0.7%) 140.3 0.000
25 FOR 1919 (1.4%) 5224 (1.0%) 120.1 0.000
30 EACH 323 (0.2%) 595 (0.1%) 100.2 0.000
44 AND 4633 (3.4%) 14610 (2.9%) 74.3 0.000
82 FROM 1048 (0.8%) 2982 (0.6%) 47.2 0.000
139 AFTER 431 (0.3%) 1139 (0.2%) 32.0 0.000
260 WITH 1711 (1.2%) 5543 (1.1%) 17.8 0.000

The language of this section is adapted to express very specific sets of

instructions, accompanied by a marked lack of subordination and often
resulting in the progressive use of shorthand abbreviations in experimental
sections. The expressions to be found in this section are thus highly regular
and presumably help the ‘indexical’ reading of the text.

3.41 METHODS salient word 1: Were.

As with ‘been’ in Introduction sections, ‘were’ is indicative of the passive.

But whereas passives elsewhere in the corpus tend to be research oriented
(‘have been identified’, etc.) here the past passive (which is largely unique to
the Methods section) is clinically or empirically oriented, involving
sometimes highly technical verbs. This contradicts Hanania and Akhtar
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(1985) who found that the passive in Methods was found to be frequently
present tense (is identified, has been identified). Conversely Heslot (1982)
and Wingard (1981) found that the simple past was prevalent in Methods
sections, which also appears to be contradicted in this corpus. In the
literature, passive expressions in science writing have been characterised as a
novel relationship between subject and verb (Sager et al. 1980, Heslot 1982,
Hanania and Akhtar 1985, Swales 1990). It can be seen that grammatical
subjects correspond consistently with either clinical or empirical verbs (with
some exceptional cross-over):

anaerobes were (empirical) enumerated

analyses were (clinical) carried out, performed, prepared
animals were (clinical) allowed food, given food, housed in
quarantine randomly assigned / allocated a cage,
killed,sacrificed
cells were (clinical) collected, cultured, fixed, grown,
incubated, maintained, plated, seeded, sonicated,
subcloned, treated, trypsinised, washed
(empirical) counted
compounds were (clinical) separated, dissolved, heated, dissolved,
obtained, prepared, combined
concentrations were (clinical) optimised, added, adjusted, maintained
(empirical) achieved
data were (empirical) pooled , expressed, obtained
(research) analysed, considered
mice / rats were (clinical) bled and killed, exposed to, fed, given
killed, observed, obtained, raised, treated,
weighed
patients were (empirical) asked for their consent, entered at
many intervals, excluded from the study,
followed until death,
(clinical) treated at dose level
samples were (clinical) collected, obtained, run at x%,
centrifuged
(empirical) counted
tissues were (clinical) fixed, homogenized

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However, patterns of the passive can perhaps be more usefully sorted

according to the elements which follow the passivised verb, which are for the
most part prepositional modifiers (adjuncts). We see later that these can be
further sorted by verbal process. I term such sorting of phraseology from one
pattern to a sub-pattern ‘collocational cascade’ because this is the effect of
the listing on the page. Thus the most frequent pattern for the passive is:
{biochemical entity} were {clinical process} by {biochemical entity}
(detailed in a later section). Setting out other passive + preposition patterns
we find that the collocational cascade takes on a further ‘step’ since each
passive then has specific (but consistent) element with a sense of
instrument / medium:

were analysed by log rank test

were analysed by ANOVA test
were analysed by using analysis of variance

were determined by TLC scanner

were determined by liquid scintillon counting
were determined by the method of Chadwick et al.
were determined by means of a Student’s t-test
were determined by the HPLC method

were killed by cervical dislocation

were killed by exsanguination
were killed by CO2 anaesthesia
were killed by CO2 asphyxiation

were obtained by measuring the fluorescence{clinical

procedure}
were obtained by using a 1.5 mm diameter cork borer
were obtained by retro-orbital bleeding of mice
were obtained by injecting 3x105 cells into both flanks

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were prepared by the reverse evaporation method

were prepared by the film method of Skoza et al.
were prepared by protein precipitation with acetonite
were prepared by dilution of the liposome dispersions

Such a use of by for the medium of the sentence rather than the agent changes
our stereotypical view of the passive (in which by signals a grammatical
agent: prepared by the scientists etc.). In a collocational framework with ‘for’
(a Methods salient word) the passive construction is empirically oriented
rather than clinical:

were analysed for {observable item}

hormone traces
were analysed for significance
were calculated for antibody depletion
were calculated for luteinizing hormone count
were eligible for {study}
the present study
were eligible for this study
were examined for {disease-related item}
visceral defects
were examined for malfunctions
were examined for external defects
were used for {research process}
observation
were used for evaluation of patients
were used for the experiments

With ‘at’ (another Methods salient word) the passive construction is used to
express some measurement together with clinical process verbs. As with the
patterns above, the collocational cascade only has one step in this pattern
since the phraseological possibilities for circumstantial elements are limited
to times/ temperatures:

{Clinical process}

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were collected at appropriate time levels

were collected at 77 minute intervals
were collected at 1 minute intervals
were incubated at 37 degrees C
were stood at room temperature
were performed at 37 degrees C
were repeated at room temperature.

The overall picture seems to be that we can usefully categorise certain

passive constructions by the types of prepositions that are used to signal
adjuncts in these expressions. These are of course mediated by the specific
phraseology of passivised verbs, and these verbs and their subjects and
adjuncts can in the majority of cases be classified semantically and regularly
subclassified by verbal process. However, there are also various choices of
expression for the same process. For example several idioms are used to
express the (legally obligatory) destruction of animals. Here are the
possibilities in decreasing order of frequency (subjects include in order of
frequency: animals, mice, rats, rabbits, pigs, monkeys, dogs and ‘control
groups’):

{animals) were killed by cervical dislocation

{animals) were sacrificed by severing the dorsal aorta
{animals) were euthanized after 82 weeks
{animals) were necrotized by CO2 asphyxiation

3.42 METHODS salient word 3: At.

Prepositions such as by and at have virtually only one use in the cancer
research article as opposed to a wide range of use in the general language.
‘At’ signals empirical measurement or quantification, either of temperature,
duration or increments of time. ‘At’ is necessary after a wide range of
passivised clinical process verbs as we have seen with ‘was / were’, or within
the collocational framework of ‘for (x hours) at (temperature x):

centrifuged at 12 000 rpm

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eluted at a flow rate of

heated at room temperature
incubated at room temperature
measured at 400mm

As stated above many of these are repeated several times within the same
text, and listed in the methods section so that certain phrases achieve the
statistical status of idioms. Here is just one example of many, although we
can claim that this is unique in that it involves a triple collocational
framework with an inverted temperature / time expression (as compared with
the expressions above): was (stirred) at (temp.) for (time.) until (empirical /
clinical process item}:

was stirred at 20 degrees C. for until DNA extraction

40 min.
until processed
until assayed
until analysed

There are also a number of idiomatic uses of ‘at’, for example the expression
‘at risk’ in apposition to either tumors / carcinomas or animals / mice. The
lexical phrase ‘at least’ is perhaps the only exception to this general modifier
pattern, although it also fits into the broader expression of ‘measurement’:

total of at least 15 000 nuclei per sample

expectancy of at least 60% a load
model cohort of at least 3 patients
based on at least 4 tumours
performed on at least 2 separate occasions

The ‘location’ meaning of ‘at’ is rare in the corpus, although we find

instances such as: unidentifiable numbers are placed at the bottom of the
scale.

3.43 METHODS salient word 4: Then.

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We have seen above that the number of uses listed in Cobuild dictionary for
certain words is usually highly restricted in the PSC. Although then is an
important feature of narrative in English, there is simply no need for
argumentation in this section of the research article and despite being a very
significantly ‘Cobuild-salient’ item, ‘then’ functions here in a restricted way
(it corresponds to 1 out of 10 possibilities in Cobuild (1995 2nd edition): as a
time-specifier before passivised verbs to signal a subsequent incremental step
in the methodology. The most fixed phraseology involves an idiomatic
expression ‘the solution was added dropwise and the suspension was then
heated’ (x4 instances). The following clinical verbs are most frequently used
in this construction:

the solution was cooled and then added

the supernatant was internalized and then extracted
fifteen slides were exposed and then incubated
the frozen cells were thawed and then transferred
the mixture was filtered and then washed

3.44 METHODS salient word 6: Each

The determiner ‘each’ is evidence of deictic refocusing, in which the

researchers emphasise the distribution and repetition of a series of clinical
processes:

{Empirical quantification : application of a dose}

verified at each dose level
entered at each dose level
repeated at each dose level
counted at each dose level
treated at each dose level

{Clinical extraction: from a subject group}

separated from each colony

aspirated from each mutant
removed from each contact

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prepared from each treated region

withdrawn from each sample

3.45 METHODS salient word 8: From

‘From’ reveals a preoccupation in the Methods sections with the source of

data samples, particularly from organisms. ‘From’ is involved in embedded
passive clauses in complex nominals (a ‘reduced-relative’ pattern). Most
verbs used as reduced relatives have the same essential meaning ‘extracted’
as in breast cancer tumours derived from host normal cells. Similar verbs
include: eluted from, extracted from, harvested from, isolated from, obtained
from, prepared from, removed from, taken from...). We can also see in the
following examples similar noun-verb relations to those presented under
‘were’, where only genetic material tends to be ‘extracted’:

DNA was extracted from paired frozen tissue

DNA was extracted from bone cells using...
Ribonucleic acid was extracted from PALL cells
mRNA was extracted from the parent cells
tRNA was extracted from the exponentially growing cells

One important exception emerges in the reduced relative expression

‘obtained from’ which appears to combine both ‘extraction from biochemical
entity’ as well as an empirical ‘based on this data source’ phraseologies:

{Research data source}

cells obtained from Dr JH van Dierendonk

data obtained from the above reaction
cultures obtained from Sigma Chemical Co.
tissues obtained from hospital recalls
values obtained from the previous study

{Clinical extraction}

DNA obtained from patients

cell lines obtained from platelet rich plasma
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mice obtained from breeding colonies

tumours obtained from control mice
A factor obtained from green tea leaves

‘From’ in noun phrases generally has the ‘extraction’ meaning. A notable

collocation is ‘(specific biochemical} cells from {biochemical specific:
culture}

trypsinized cells from monolayer cultures

spleen cells from tissue culture
tumor cells from peripheral tissue cultures
mononuclear cells from control animals
epithelial cells from immunized mice

3.46 METHODS salient word 10: With.

We have already mentioned the significant role of ‘with’ in a collocational

framework with ‘were’. Whereas in Titles ‘with’ is a salient word used to
conjoin similar research processes, in the Methods subcorpus it signals the
instrument or medium by which the clinical methodology is achieved. An
even more specific phraseology can be found with certain verbs which all
have a delimited set of possible instruments:

{biochemical solution}
were activated with ethanol
were activated with an equal amount of saline
were activated with a cell suspension
were activated with the culture medium
were activated with blank human plasma

{subject-derived serum}
were incubated with a mouse monoclonal antibody
were incubated with monoclonal antibodies
were incubated with antimouse antiserum
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were incubated with test sera

were incubated with antirat IgG mixture

{colouring agent}
were stained with 10% ammonium sulphide
were stained with Alcian blue stain
were stained with brilliant crystal blue
were stained with nitro-blue tetrazolium
were stained with monoclonal antibody

3.5 RESULTS sections

The following results were obtained for grammatical items in Results

sections.

Table 15: Results salient grammatical items from the Wordlist program

RANK WORD PSC % in PSC % in Chi sq. Probab

Results subcorp Freq. whole ility=
Freq us corpus
16 NO 296 (0.2%) 694 (0.1%) 70.0 0.000
28 IN 3906 (3.3%) 14349 (2.9%) 50.4 0.000
29 DID 176 (0.1%) 395 47.5 0.000
30 NOT 595 (0.5%) 1798 (0.4%) 46.5 0.000
37 HAD 206 (0.2%) 517 (0.1%) 38.2 0.000
41 AFTER 385 (0.3%) 1139 (0.2%) 33.8 0.000
72 THERE 168 (0.1%) 444 25.2 0.000
80 THE 7427 (6.2%) 29122 (5.8%) 23.4 0.000
92 WHEN 184 (0.2%) 518 (0.1%) 20.8 0.000
125 ALL 252 (0.2%) 783 (0.2%) 16.3 0.000

The general phraseology of Results sections is dominated by lexical

refocusing, subordination and reporting of quantitative results. We have seen
in the discussion of in, did and not above, that Results sections attempt to
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evaluate positive and negative results, whereas Abstracts tend to present

results (especially negative ones) as quantitative findings.

3.51 RESULTS salient word 1: No.

‘No’ is the most significant salient word in the Results section, and its role in
signalling significant or contradictory data similar to the ‘but...’ pattern in
Abstracts. ‘No’ functions uniquely as a determiner, a usage that is not among
the 12 uses of the word in the Cobuild 1995 dictionary. Its most frequent use
is in the expression ‘there was no significant {difference / correlation}:

{Empirical statement} {Data shape} {Biochemical / clinical}

There was no significant change in radiosensitivity
There was no significant difference in plating efficiency
There was no significant increase in hydrolysis
There was no significant change in the time course of efflux
There was no significant variation in food...consumption

This contrasts with affirmative statements of this kind, which tend to be

expressed in the present tense (as discussed above under the item ‘there’).
We also find several instances of the passive form of this kind of phrase:

No significant relationship was found.

No significant association was observed.
No significant association was found between tumor grade and LH
No significant difference was observed during the time period
No significant correlation was observed with respect to rewrite mRNA

The changing preoccupations of the researchers can be seen in the fact that
the passive is preferred for research process verbs rather than the clinical
verbs observed earlier in the Abstract and Methods sections. When the term
‘significant’ is not chosen, another evaluative term is necessary with forms of
‘to be’:

{Empirical evaluation}

There was no apparent effect of diet

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There was no consistent pattern across concentration

There was no detectable difference in the incidence of
There was no strong evidence for tumor development

A negative determiner also demonstrates evaluation in relational process

verbs:

vaccination had no significant effect on the factor

protein inhibitors had no incremental effect on tumor growth
ethanol 1% had no apparent effect on the p158 cell line
There may be no obvious symptoms of cachexia

Other uses of ‘no’ reveal the delexical nature of verbs used to report findings.
The verb gave collocates regularly with the subject analysis, while revealed
corresponds with specific clinical methods:

{analysis} {empirical quantification}

R analysis gave no indication of allelic losses
SSC P analysis gave no indication of p52 alterations
analysis of NAK gave no statistical significance
sensitivity correlation

{clinical method} {biochemical process}

screening revealed no activity
post-mortem revealed no evidence of metastasis
examination
a topographic revealed no effect within the group
scan...

The above patterns could have been expressed using an existential ‘there was
no’ (as in the Abstract) but here are used to emphasise the biochemical entity
or clinical process initiating the empirical lack of relationship.

3.52 RESULTS salient word 5: Had.

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The role of the relational processes ‘is a’ and ‘have a’ is linked with
evaluation in this corpus. ‘Had’ is more restricted however, and in the results
subcorpus, ‘had’ serves to signal some degree of quantification rather than
qualitative evaluation as for has / have in Introductions. The subject often
tends to be a biochemical subject:

{Biochemical entity} {Quantification}

mice had a decreased number of formations

animal tumours had a greater mean length
rat liver had a higher glucose count
patients had a lower frequency
protein had a more pronounced effect
infants had a much lower susceptibility
controls had a normal haryotype enzymes
subjects had a smaller body mass

This pattern has also been noted in relation to the determiner ‘no’ which can
stand in place of the evaluative quantifier, although this expression is limited
to biochemical compound subjects with empirical item ‘effect’ as head of
complement:

the vehicle [=drug] had no effect on tumor expression

ZAAf had no effect on the reduction of tumor
size
treatment of narial cells had no effect on weight gain
methanol control had no effect on number of implantations
2 weeks experiments had no effect on the factor X activator

One fixed collocation emerges in this context: {tumour expression} had

significant prognostic value:

Ta-T tumours <had significant prognostic value>

tumor expression <had significant prognostic value>
overexpression of p53 <had significant prognostic value>

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The inhibitor <had significant prognostic value>

The receptor antagonist ondansetron <had significant prognostic value>

When ‘had’ is used as an auxiliary to express the passive perfect, its

participle verbs are clinical processes, in direct contrast with the past passive
(‘was /were’) in the Methods section.

electrode had been allocated

the film had been deposited
inspection of the electrode had been electropolymerised
tumour-bearing mice had been exposed to
rats that had been treated to.

This is further proof that the past tense can be seen as a marked tense,
indicating proximity to current research.

3.53 RESULTS salient word 8: The.

The statistical significance of ‘the’ appears to indicate that textual reference

to previously mentioned items increases in later stages of the text, a discourse
effect that correlates with increased lexical refocusing and rephrasing in later
stages of writing. The definite article is obligatory in several collocational
framework constructions, and so is a useful indicator of terminological units.
Among the more frequent frameworks, we identify the following categories:

Empirical framework:
by the (addition, method, end, of> <(followed, increased,
presence, production) affected, reflected, mediated)

<for the (basis, achievement, accumulation, crossreaction) of>

<in the (presence, size, staging, setting, release, zones, of>

care, levels, absence, range, appearance,
relationship)

Clinical framework:
<after the (infusion, administration, end, injection, delivery, of>
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implantation, removal)

Research framework:
<during the (interval, period, intervals, periods) of (study,
observation)>

Measurement framework:
<(consistency, of the (product, mean, of the (first values,
fraction, precision, estimation, loss, values, body
on the basis, time incidence, 21%, weight,
course, grading) accumulation) hyperplasmin,
dose, cell
populations)>

Mixed category (research + empirical + biochemical?)

<(formed, found, on the (sensitivity, of (the cell, these results,

calculated, effect) basis, range) the data, our data, p-
rated hypertosis)>

<in the (absence, presence, care, liver ) of>

It can be seen that in all of these frameworks (with the exception of the
biochemical sets) all members of the bracketed cluster share some semantic
similarity, even though they may not all fall into our rough 5-part category
system. This is perhaps not surprising - as Renouf and Sinclair (1991) point
out, collocational frameworks depend on their lexical elements to motivate
the structure. The regularity with which some are composed confirms the
view that prepositions are particularly important to the phraseological
specificity of the corpus. The same can also be said of items which have a
wide set of uses in one grammatical role but appear to have a unique
phraseology as prepositions (such as to).

3.54 RESULTS salient word 9: when.

Some forms of subordination (especially signalled by a conjunctive binder)

increase in later stages of the research article. ‘When’ is used to introduce
subordinate clauses detailing a clinical process after a description of research
findings. The Results section can be seen to reformulate and re-word clinical
experiments already described in the Methods section. The prevalent

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structure involves a research process usually expressed by the passive of two

verbs observed and obtained:

{Empirical item} {Research process} {Clinical process}

loss of the film band was observed when films were photolysed
distinct redistribution was observed when cells were treated
The results were obtained when tumors were exposed
Almost identical values were obtained when (X) was substituted
A greater than 95% yield was obtained when the equivalent was treated

In Methods sections ‘after’ is used to introduce nominalisations of a clinical

process, and in Results sections such expressions can be seen to be
‘unpacked’ into clauses. This can be seen in reduced subordinate clauses
especially with the verb ‘compared’:

{Empirical measurement} {Clinical items}

were significantly reduced when compared to c
o
n
tr
o
ls
yielded a 7 fold increase when compared to t
h
e
c
o
n
tr
o
ls
showed superior effects t
h
e
s
a
m
e
d
o
s

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resulted in growth delay when compared with injection of

saline
produced a significant effect when compared with groups
receiving no
treatment
infusion was delayed when compared with groups
receiving no
SCTT

3.55 RESULTS salient word 10: All.

‘All’ is a salient word in Results sections. It plays a role in the phraseology of

generalisation across the totality of data, and also an important role in lexical
reformulation. Of the more regular lexical phrases ‘in all cases’ precedes a
statement of specific results:

In all cases the medium was supplanted

In all cases normal weight was regained
In all cases the interval returned to baseline
In all cases the relationship ... fell short
In all cases nuclei had upfield shifts

‘All other’ serves in particular to rephrase items more generally within a

taxonomy:

All other dose groups of males were euthanized

All other gross observations were checked
All other microscopic findings were incidental
All other microvessels showed no change
All other regions remained the same in sensibility

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3.6 DISCUSSION sections

Table 16: Discussion salient grammatical items from the Wordlist

program

RANK WORD PSC % PSC % Chi sq. Probab

Discussion in Freq in ility=
Freq subcor whole
pus corpus
1 THAT 1381 (1.2%) 3357 (0.7%) 341.8 0.000
2 BE 788 (0.7%) 1825 (0.4%) 225.6 0.000
3 MAY 383 (0.3%) 658 (0.1%) 223.2 0.000
4 IS 1167 (1.0%) 3169 (0.6%) 193.1 0.000
7 OUR 222 (0.2%) 381 129.0 0.000
9 IN 3991 (3.5%) 14349 (2.9%) 116.0 0.000
11 NOT 662 (0.6%) 1798 (0.4%) 108.9 0.000
12 THIS 704 (0.6%) 1997 (0.4%) 96.2 0.000
13 WE 395 (0.3%) 972 (0.2%) 92.9 0.000
14 HAVE 442 (0.4%) 1127 (0.2%) 92.1 0.000

Whereas the phraseology of the Results section is determined largely by

refocusing and evaluation of data, the Discussion section can be characterised
by considerable lexical reformulation, explanation (by relational processes
and explicit signaling), modality and grammatical projection (most often in
terms of reporting or referring to previous research).

3.61 DISCUSSION salient word 2: Be.

The high statistical significance of the infinitive be is largely due to the

presence of large numbers of modal verbs in Discussion sections. We have
seen in the discussion above of ‘that’ that modality in the evaluation of
findings is a very salient feature of Discussion sections. Evaluation takes two
distinct forms: external evaluation (commenting on the value of findings for
future research) and internal evaluation (commenting on the significance of
findings for the present argument). When ‘be’ is introduced by ‘can’ the

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expression tends to be negative, and is uniquely used to express inclusion or

exclusion in respect to the ‘internal’ research model:

analysis cannot be excluded

range of interactants cannot be completely excluded
ratio cannot be ruled out

‘Could’ tends to indicate either the researchers’ ability to evaluate or explain

a biochemical fact in terms of ‘external’ benefits:

{Biochemical process} {Empirical explanation / evaluation}

chemotherapy could be a potential benefit
chromatography could be a promising candidate for
tumor expression could be an appropriate target
This [inhibitor] could be explained by two steps
This [overexpression] could be explained as cellular

This variety contrasts markedly with ‘must’ which is limited to the

collocation must be due to (and thus forms an ‘internal explanation’)

Biochemical / empirical process: Biochemical explanation:

These results must be due to administration with
These results must be due to reabsorption
This suggestion must be due to enzymatic activity
The dispersion must be due to seasonal variation
This variation must be due to increased solvoyosis

This rhetorical certainty clearly differs from its exhortative or empathetic

uses in the general language (‘you must be tired’: a significant use in the
Cobuild dictionary). In contrast, the modal should does tend to be used to
persuade or recommend - a similar usage in the general language. Its main
difference with other modals in Discussion sections is that the recommended
actions tend to be passivised research processes (its uses are generally
external: as in: X should undergo further investigation):

{Research process}

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should be evaluated
should be investigated
should be mentioned
should be justified

Furthermore, the expression ‘it should be noted that’ is used to introduce a

finding from current or previous research (‘internal’ argumentation):

It should be noted that tumor cell lines are heterogeneous

It should be noted that others have found higher expression
It should be noted that ...tests have some degree of
interdependence
It should be noted that the degrees of inhibition... did not
exceed 70%
It should be noted that the decay does not take place in a
concerted electron transfer

‘Would’ tends on the other hand to be used in more instances of hypothetical

subjectivity than other modals (mostly ‘internal’ argumentation):

the most likely source would be expected to return its reactivity

it would not be wise to allow plasma
stretching modes would be sufficient
this localisation would be in agreement with
such a ...mechanism would be interesting to know

‘Will’ also introduces evaluation rather than explanation, and emphasises

future research (a clear ‘external’ phraseology):

cytometric analysis will be required for different outcomes

samples will be required to determine whether
this cohort will be suitable
modulation of their kinase will be important for...
level
tests will be of limited value
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If these modals are related to their historical ‘tensed’ categories, it can be

seen that there is no correspondence between ‘present tense’ modals (can,
will, may - from our discussion below-) and ‘past tense’ modals (could,
would, must, should). With the possible exception of would, most modals are
however used consistently with argument-internal or argument-external
verbs.
A even more explicit distinction between evaluative and non-evaluative
empirical processes emerges in examples of phase-modality, where the
second verb is introduced not as a subordinate clause but as an infinitive
‘tensed’ by the initial finite. The most frequent is ‘appear to be’ (x39
occurrences), which is accompanied by clear examples of comparative
evaluation:

This response appears to be definitely ruled out

These appear to be significant relationships
These tissues appear to be very suitable for sequential
measurement
This immunoprocess appears to be much more resistant to cytotoxicity
This detection method appears to be important in immortalisation

Other expressions share this pattern, such as ‘likely to be’ and ‘found to be’:

(biochemical process X} was found to be considerably more potent

(biochemical process X} was found to be more reliable
(biochemical process X} was found to be the best strategy
(biochemical process X} was found to be much higher

The evaluative pattern is in contrast with that associated with the phase-
modal ‘need to be’, which requires a research process as main verb:

Research process Research process:

This hypothesis needs to be formally tested

the new findings need to be classified
Many more samples needs to be examined in order to establish
More.. cell tumors needs to be studied in order to verify whether
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These new strategies... need to be devised

3.62 DISCUSSION salient word 3: May.

We have seen in previous sections that ‘may’ is the preferred modal in

subordinate clauses after expressions such as ‘it is possible that’ and ‘it is
likely that’. In most of these expressions, modality corresponds with explicit
markers of evaluation. However, outside subordination the majority of the
uses of ‘may’ appear to function as true ‘hedges’ by proposing an explanation
and indicating to the discourse community that the researchers know it may
not be true in all circumstances. Two of the most frequent examples of this
are:

{Empirical result} {Biochemical explanation}

ineffectiveness.... may be related to sensitivity
efficiency of this line may be related to crosstransformation
the more moderate effect may be related to cell differentiation

lack of bioavailability may be due to error prone synthesis

deficiency in ..body may be due to direct effects of replication
weight
Another possibility may be due to inherent differences in age

3.64 DISCUSSION salient word 5: Our.

The statistical significance of ‘our’ in Discussion sections is not surprising

given that ‘we’ is also a Discussion-salient word (discussed above). Personal
pronouns are infrequent in the corpus as a whole, and ‘our’ signals a shift
from impersonal expression to clear signals of ‘ownership’ of research in the
Discussion section:

Our results show that

Our data show that
Our study shows that
Our findings show that
Our studies show that
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Most references to the researchers tend to involve hedging:

Our study suggests that

Our study suggests indicates
Our study suggests demonstrates

However, if the term ‘analysis’ is used, no hedge or complement clause is

introduced:

Our analysis focused on a limited subset

Our analysis was based on immunohistochemical studies
Our analysis was based on four methods
Our analysis was to establish criteria for histology
Our analysis was to understand embedded tissue

Finally, specifying adverbs such as ‘clearly’ are used to emphasise the

researchers’ certainty when no hedging verb is used:

Our results clearly indicate

Our results clearly demonstrate
Our results clearly show that
Our results strongly argue that

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3.65 DISCUSSION salient word 8: This.

‘This’ is an important item in the textual development of research articles. As

a pronoun, this selects an element from previous discourse as the focus of a
developing explanation:

This suggests that...

This may explain...
This might explain...
This is in agreement...
This is in contrast to...

This use is more common in Methods and Results sections. In Discussions,

this is more likely to serve as a determiner, reformulating a previous item or
proposition as a more general category (for example, expressing a statistical
or biochemical fact as a ‘result’):

{Research reformulation as anaphoric utterance}

This result...
This finding...
This observation...
This model...[ambiguous: this may also be interpreted as a ‘structure’]
This hypothesis...

This contrasts with less frequent (but more varied) terminological

reformulations:

{Biochemical reformulation by superordinate}

This region...
This cell line...
This group...
This model [as above, this may also be interpreted as a ‘hypothesis’]
This protein...
This type...
This compound...

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This activity...

In addition, a series of reformulations correspond to specific collocational

frameworks, such as ‘This {empirical result} in {biochemical / empirical
item}’:

This appearance in parental cells

This delay in PMN appearance
This difference in rate constant
This disparity in degree of suppression
This increase in metabolic rate

In the framework ‘This...of’ the pattern involves a superordinate empirical

item which constitutes the object of measurement rather than a result (as
opposed to the pattern above): ‘This (empirical data set} of {biochemical /
empirical process/entity}’:

This class of aromatic compounds

This dose of chemical...
This group of tumours
This period of time
This range of concentrations

I have omitted one high frequency item that is very frequently used to
reformulate results, but is difficult to classify as either research or empirically
oriented on the basis of its intrinsic meaning: this effect. We have already
seen that effect has a complex complement structure, accounting for several
complex collocational frameworks in Titles and Abstracts (in particular in
collocations with in and of). The word can be used to label observable and
measurable phenomena (such as this motion, this reaction) and at the same
time can be construed as a researcher’s interpretation or modelling of results
(this tendency, this frequency). The word appears to lie somewhere in
between this hypothesis (a clear research-orientation) and this activity (an
empirical observation). By reformulating observations as an effect the
researchers simultaneously explain results and comment on previous data
without proposing a new model:
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#1 The increased liver weight #2 This effect could be the result of increased
was reversible. intracellular glycogens
#1 Treatment with 8-chloro #2 This effect is even more pronounced in MCF
cAMP drastically reduces R1 LOA cells
levels.
#1 LUMO gap is correlated with #2 This effect is misleading. However, some
downward shift. shifts are involved...
#1 Both approaches resulted in #2 This effect on ECM degradation indicates
80% inhibition. that cell UPA is much more efficient.
#1 EFF cells grew slightly faster #2 This effect was independent of oestrogens.
in MEM.

To use Halliday’s terminology, the clause introduced by this effect is an

expansion of a previous formulation. The expression differs with research
process re-phrasings such as ‘This result’ (the most frequent expression used
with this). This result tends to introduce a new research direction which does
expand on the previous result but essentially goes beyond it in a reference to
research implications:

#1 DNA sequencing of the #2 This result eliminates the possibility that

melanoma revealed that p53 mutations are germline...it suggests a mutagenic
codons... were wild type. mechanism.
#1 We observe several large AJ- #2 This result may indicate that AJ-IX is a very
IX positive mRNAs distant exon.
#1 90% of the carbonium ion was #2 this result suggests that inorganic phosphate
trapped and can compete with water to trap the ion.
#1 The reaction.. produces #2 This result is consistent with the partitioning
MeOArc. of a common intermediate.
#1 The study .. produced a 23 #2 but we have not been able to reproduce this
response rate result.

It can be seen from both of these items that reformulation is not just a process
of lexical selection, but also involves the rest of the clause which
accompanies the reformulating item. It seems that the meaning of
reformulations such as ‘this effect’ and ‘this result’ depend on the orientation
of the following clause. The semantics of a particular word are therefore
thrown into sharp relief by its context of use, but can also be seen to be stable
in rhetorical terms– at least in the context of a particular genre.
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V. Phraseology and the Discourse Of Science

The main focus of this book has been to examine the specific context of the
cancer research article. In previous sections, I proposed that grammatical
items are a useful starting point in the analysis of scientific texts. The
collocational behaviour of a selection of grammatical items was set out in the
preceding chapter in order to relate patterns of phraseology to the style and
rhetorical function of the different sections of the research article. I now
summarise the main findings of this study and examine some of the
implications and limitations of the analysis carried out in this book.

1. Collocations and the Theory of Phraseology

Collocations are words which tend to co-occur in recurrent, recognisable

expressions. Our data analysis above shows different collocations are
attracted to grammatical items in different types of text. At a basic level of
text analysis therefore, I hope to have shown that the comparison of word
lists and collocational patterns provides a systematic method of contrasting a
specific genre with a general corpus of texts. Collocational patterns thus
appear to be fundamental units in the stylistic description of texts.
I also hope to have established the notion of collocation within a general
theory of language. In phraseology studies, it is generally accepted that
clusters of more than one word can reflect a single choice. We have seen in
the data analysis above that fixed expressions are often made up of sequences
of grammatical items alone, or in combination with high frequency lexical
words. In addition, when different lexical items are involved in collocation,
the differences of phraseology they exhibit suggest that they are chosen with
their role in the larger text in mind. Thus words are chosen not simply for the
information they bring along but also for their long-range ability to signal
textual relations. These observations appear to confirm the role of
grammatical collocation in discourse, and serve to redefine the relationship
between the word and the text.
The starting point of my analysis has been to establish a basic ‘statistical /
textual’ definition of collocation. This view of collocation does not pre-
define the unit of analysis as a grammatical phrase, but seeks simply to find
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significant recurrent expressions. The term ‘statistical’ derives from Berry-

Rogghe’s (1970) analysis of statistical collocation and also refers to
Sinclair’s procedure of relating different distributions of collocation to lexical
or grammatical categories (Sinclair 1991). The term ‘textual’ is used here to
suggest that collocations must at first be defined in terms of their textual
occurrence, that is to say their use in authentic, naturally occurring texts.
However, the analysis I set out above demonstrates that there is more to
collocation than word frequency and co-occurrence. We have seen that there
are considerable restrictions on expression in science writing, and that
semantic sets of low frequency words (lexical clusters) tend to be organised
very consistently in specific grammatical patterns, a restriction that is
compatible with the ‘semantic / syntactic’ view of collocation set out by
lexicologists such as Howarth (1998) and the systemic grammarians, in
particular Hunston and Francis (1998). We have also observed that on many
occasions, collocations and lexical phrases are used as specific
communicative acts. This corresponds to a ‘discoursal / rhetorical’ view of
fixed expressions, as seen in the work of Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) and
Fernando (1996). Thus collocation is a fundamental notion within a much
broader and more complex system of phraseology. I have already noted that
this use of the term does not correspond to that used by many lexicologists.
Instead this view of phraseology is compatible with the work of Gläser
(1998) and Moon (1998a and 1998b). The statistical analysis of collocation is
therefore the building block upon which more sophisticated degrees of
description and explanation can be based.
Phraseology is the ‘preferred way of saying things within a particular
discourse’. The notion of phraseology implies much more than inventories of
idioms and systems of lexical patterns. Phraseology is a dimension of
language use in which patterns of wording (lexico-grammatical patterns)
encode semantic views of the world, and at a higher level idioms and lexical
phrases have rhetorical and textual roles within a specific discourse.
Phraseology is at once a pragmatic dimension of linguistic analysis, and a
system of organisation which encompasses more local lexical relationships,
namely collocation and the lexico-grammar. I claim that the phraseological
analysis of a text should not only involve the identification of specific
collocations and idioms, but must also take account of the correspondence
between the expression and the discourse within which it has been produced.
A visualisation may help to conceptualise the relationship between these
three different levels of lexical organisation:

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Levels of organisation. Systems of organisation.

Phraseology
Discoursal-rhetorical.

Semantic-syntactic. Lexico-grammar

Statistical-textual.
Collocation

The flow chart on the left represents increasingly sophisticated levels of

textual description. While these are mutually dependent and inclusive (with
collocation providing the basis of all observations at a phraseological level,
for example), they correspond to systems of explanation which differ in
essential ways (i.e. syntagmatic, semantic and pragmatic systems). By
breaking phraseology down into sub-systems and attempting to fix the
relationship between such terms as phraseology and lexico-grammar in this
way, I am proposing a framework within which it is possible to discuss
various levels of lexical expression in a particular text. At the same time, the
model distinguishes usefully between descriptive systems, which are often
felt to be interdependent, and their corresponding explanatory systems which
differ in qualitative terms. I use the terms of this model to summarise my
general findings below.

2. Phraseology and Scientific Style.

The analysis of grammatical items in the preceding chapters of this book has
revealed a number of interesting properties of the scientific text. From the
point of view of genre analysis and English for Specific Purposes (ESP),
there is much to be said about the role of grammatical collocation and
scientific style. The data I set out above show how statistically significant
grammatical items can be identified using Wordlist (Scott 1993). This
provides a list of ‘salient’ words for each section of the research article (these
are summarised in section 4.3 below). Even this relatively simple,
mechanical step reveals that the distribution of grammatical items varies

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systematically in different rhetorical sections of the article. More generally, I

claim that collocational patterns are central to the analysis of register, genre
and style. This textual view of collocation is compatible with more recent
work on the theoretical framework of lexicogrammar (Halliday 1985) and the
phraseological analysis of texts (Moon 1998a and 1998b).
One implication of the data I have presented here is that there is a shared
scientific voice or ‘phraseological accent’ which leads much technical
writing to polarise around a number of stock phrases. Fixed expressions
ranging from drug of choice..., yielded modest increases in..., is stable to the
action of... are pervasive in the corpus, but are also at times unusual
formulations which are stylistically marked in comparison with general
English. While they appear to be normal from the point of view of the
science writer, such particular forms of expression stand in marked contrast
to alternative ways of putting words to these ideas, a point that is often lost in
large-scale corpus analysis. As Halliday (1998) has recently noted, there is a
‘favourite clause type’ in scientific English. Complexes of two or more
clauses are typically compacted as ‘things’ (noun phrases) in a simple
relational clause, the kind of sentence structure that appears to be widespread
in scientific writing. He gives an idealised example (1998:190):

Process Relation Process

1 The driver drove the bus too fast down the so the
hill, brakes
failed.
2 The driver’s overrapid downhill driving of the caused brake
bus failure.

The wording in 2) is an example of Halliday’s notion of grammatical

metaphor. We have seen in the introduction to this book that grammatical
metaphor serves to re-express a complex formulation, taking it generally
towards a more nominal mode of expression. In fact, many of the seemingly
complex idiomatic expressions we find in the corpus share this underlying
property. Thus a drug of choice is a behavioural process encoded as a
nominal entity, stable to the action of is a relational process encoded as an
adjectival quality, and yielded increases in is an empirical observation of
circumstance encoded as a material verb. Halliday claims that such highly
distilled structures share the single underlying mechanism of grammatical
metaphor (1998: 211). He further points out that far from merely providing
novel ways of saying the same thing, grammatical metaphor plays a useful
role in the distribution of thematic roles within the clause and at the same

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time is a key mechanism in the construction of new meanings.

Nominalisation has been noted on many occasions before in science writing,
but Halliday has shown that the process is present in a whole series of
grammatical expressions and clause types. Other Hallidayan linguists,
including Banks (1994) and Derewianka (1994), have pointed out that this
shift of expression underpins processes such as modality, hedging and the use
of the passive in science writing. Thus from the point of view of phraseology,
the underlying tendency to use grammatical metaphor explains to some
extent why scientific language appears to be so constrained and so
stylistically marked in relation to the general language.
Collocational patterns emerge as a consistent but largely subliminal
feature of language. They are specific to the genre and even to the subgenre
or section of the text. And those collocations which emerge in our corpus
appear for the most part to be consistent with the general stylistic shift of
scientific English towards grammatical metaphor. The regularity and
widespread nature of much of the phraseology we have observed above is
compelling evidence not only for the existence of a discourse community, but
for the pervasive influence of community norms on general style and
expression. Such consistencies have been identified widely in the literature
on genre analysis, and range from the macro-level of the text to small-scale
grammatical patterns of usage. Thus Swales’ (1990) conception of discourse
community relies on large-scale regularities in rhetorical structure, while
Myers (1991) examines the consistent use of long-range cohesive devices
within the research article genre. On the other hand, Master (1987) examines
the role of generic the in research articles, and Salager-Meyer (1992) and
others examine lexical metaphor, the rhetorical role of tense and verb form in
science texts and other micro- textual features. I suggest that the collocational
patterns we have seen above (including the use of idioms, fixed expressions
and other formulae) provide a useful intermediary stage of analysis between
the macro and the micro levels of linguistic description. Collocation is the
link between the word on the one hand and the text on another.
Collocations appear to confirm the existence of a discourse community.
Their very consistent nature suggests that collocations have a central role to
play in discourse, at a metaphorical level in terms of reformulating ideas but
also, to use Halliday’s terms, at the level of textual organisation and
interpersonal expression. Nevertheless, this picture is complicated by the fact
that the research article genre does not have a single monolithic style, or
lexico-grammar, with entirely predictable features. The sheer variety of
graphic presentation from one research specialism to another is a useful
reminder of the complexity and heterogeneous nature of scientific discourse.
The regularity and pervasive nature of collocation appears to be incompatible

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with the intuition that an individual’s use of language is inherently unique

and creative. While presentation and format are matters of conscious editorial
control within different research articles, collocational style is presumably
not a conscious product of composition or of editing. Instead, it is likely that
the collocational coherence of a text is an acquired characteristic derived by
the writer from wide reading and sub-conscious attempts to conform to the
norm of speech in the scientific community.
I have pointed out above that the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus includes
a wide variety of different specialisms even within the specific field of cancer
research. Even texts within the same journal cover very different areas of
research, and the authors originate from different institutions and language
backgrounds. So it must be the case that examples of collocational regularity
across these widely different research specialisms (and across a broad range
of periodicals) represent a form of coherent scientific style. The term I
propose for these expressions is generic collocation. Thus just as the
discourse community has its system of genres and technical jargon, it may
also develop a more subtle set of identifying expressions, at least in its formal
modes of written communication. It does not appear enough however to
suggest that collocations and phraseology are dependent on style and
interpersonal factors such as similar rhetorical functions. I have suggested
above that phraseology may have an important role to play in the textual
development of meaning, and so any explanation of the consistent style must
in some respects return to the preoccupation of terminologists and attempt to
relate the ‘preferred way of saying things’ with the prevalent knowledge
structure of science.
More recently, Lemke (1998) has shown that several genres are present
within a single text, and that it would be an oversimplification to see
scientific style as purely limited to a specific genre within the broader
language system. Despite the collocational specificity of many of the
expressions we have examined above, there is no reason to believe that
scientific texts are wholly separate from the general language or that they do
not interact with or derive new modes of expression from everyday speech.
Indeed, Halliday and Martin (1993) have consistently argued that the general
language is itself imbued with the phraseology of several competing technical
registers, from the language of science and religion to that of business and
journalism:

Every text, from the discourses of technocracy and bureaucracy to the television
magazine and the blurb on the back of the cereal packet, is in some way affected
by the modes of meaning that evolved as the scaffolding for scientific
knowledge... In other words, the language of science has become the language of
literacy (Halliday and Martin 1993:11)
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Halliday and Martin see the influence of scientific discourse as pervasive in

society, especially in the context of advanced and higher education. Their
thesis has been to alert educational authorities to this influence so that
students from non-literate backgrounds can deal with technical language.
While other forms of discourse may be equally as influential (such as the
discourse of commerce), scientific discourse can be seen to operate in a large
number of genres that are ultimately derived from research articles. As we
saw in the PSC survey of scientists in chapter 2, research articles compete for
the reader’s attention with review articles, experimental articles, accelerated
communications, ‘popular’ science articles (in Nature etc.) and indexing
abstracts. But one can also note the important role of the ‘grey literature’
(Auger 1979); that is, of grant proposals and the reports of the research
funding councils, and the press releases of the major cancer charities.
Specialist research articles have adapted very specialised ways of
processing scientific knowledge. But science as a human activity is embodied
in discourse, not just in research articles and the discourse of science is
appropriated by various groups rather than produced or reproduced in texts.

3. The Lexico-grammar of the Scientific Research Article.

The theory of lexicogrammar is based on the observation that different words

tend to have unique grammatical relations, and that extended expressions
tend to include only those items which have the same semantic properties.
This book has attempted to construct the essential elements of a lexico-
grammar of the research article genre, at least in the field of cancer research.
To present a summary of the lexico-grammar of research articles here
would belie the complexity of the data. Nevertheless, there are some general
correspondences between grammatical items on the one hand and the
communicative functions of each section in the corpus. The picture of a
homogenous grammar extending from the Title to the Discussions section
fades away, and we are left with highly specific grammatical subsystems for
each of the rhetorical sections of the article. These remarks become even
more significant, when one considers that most of the ‘science’ in the
research article is reformulated from one section to the next, and that the text
is in effect a cyclical series of more or less complex paraphrases and re-
evaluations of the same data. The differences in wording between different
sections must therefore be interpreted in terms of the textual and
interpersonal functions of the text rather than simply in terms of propositional
information.

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Introductions, for example, involve the lion’s share of infinitive clauses of

projection (clauses introduced by ‘to’, e.g. has been shown to... + non-finite
verb), while projection in Abstracts and Discussion sections is typically finite
(it has been shown that + finite verb). In addition, we have seen above that
even the same salient items in different rhetorical sections have subtle but
consistent variations in use. For example, while there is significant negative
polarity in both Abstracts and Results sections (expressed by did not),
Abstracts summarise the quantity of negative results (did not decrease
significantly), while Results sections compare data and explain negative
results in terms of quality (did not result in significant metastasis). Generally
speaking, grammatical items in cancer research articles tend to have a much
more restricted set of uses than in the general language (at least in
comparison with items listed in the Cobuild dictionary). Thus despite
differences between conventional sections, some individual grammatical
items share associated phraseological roles throughout the corpus. This
involves such features as the construction of nominal groups (where ‘of’ is a
significant item), signalling of negative results (‘but’), the reformulation of
immediately neighbouring discourse (‘this’), evaluation in relational clauses
(following ‘is, have’), research- or empirically oriented clause complexes
(‘that’ or ‘to’), passives (‘been’), the quantification of clinical processes
(‘at’), the qualification of effects or results (‘in’), the expression of modality
and hedging (‘be’) and indirect impersonal metaphor (‘it’). Thus while a
grammatical item in the general language may have a largely unpredictable
set of contexts, the corpus allows us to infer a very specific phraseology and
system of lexico-grammatical relations for these words.
However, the lexical and semantic structure of the research article
becomes much more predictable when we examine coherent subsections of
the corpus. For example, the typical phraseology of Titles centres on
prepositions such as of which are used to form complex nominal groups. The
focus of research in Titles tends to be to the left of the expression with an
empirical or biochemical finding in thematic position with post-modifying
phrases tending to express clinical methodology. If the left-hand item is a
semi-technical noun, such as evaluation, relation, effects then this item serves
as the methodological focus of research rather than a biochemical entity,
although this entity or process must then be expressed as the next element
(i.e. is not head of the noun group). While this is the dominant phrase
structure, a minority of Titles also involve active clauses, which usually
involve an attributive clause, serving as an immediate evaluation of results:

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Titles
inhibition effects of chemotherapy on metastases (complex biochemical nominal)
Evaluation of prognostic factors in breast cancer (complex research nominal)
tobacco as a risk factor for lung cancer (nominal with goal)
The relation between clinical and histological outcome... (framework with conjunction)
pS2 is an independent factor of good prognosis in primary breast cancer (evaluation)

In contrast, salient expressions in Abstracts represent grammatical

compaction (relative clauses and hypotactic expansions which define the
scope of reference of a the main nominal expression) and the quantitative
reporting of data shapes (rising, falling, stable or negative statistical results)
together with other past-tense findings:

Abstracts
the mechanism of action of {compound Y} was shown to {+ empirical process} (complex
nominal expression of findings)
there was a significant increase in toxicity (quantitative report)
It is concluded that propagation did not increase (impersonal expression of quantitative
report)
subjects who receive active management (fixed embedded clause)
both normal and tumor cells (framework with co-ordinate conjunction).

Introductions in turn contain perhaps the longest stretches of consistent

phraseology, generally reformulating previous research or evaluating
established concepts (in the present and present perfect) or announcing
action-oriented events (research aims and intended methodology expressed in
the past tense). Such events tend to be associated with to- and that-clause
projections:

Introductions
p53 gene resistance has been reported (fixed expression of report)
PIMO has received little attention (fixed expression of report)
studies have shown that... (fixed expression of report)
is an effective inhibitor (expression of evaluation)
(Compound X) is stable to the action of (Compound Y) (expression of empirical result)
use of agents such as dismutase (refocusing previous item)
it was also found that (reporting previous research)

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In this study we examine (fixed expression of report)

the purpose of the present study was to expand data (fixed expression).

Methods sections contain a variety of fixed expressions, and their

phraseology is principally concerned with the circumstances of clinical
procedure such as sequences, rates of change and clinical extractions from
one data source to another. The past passive also becomes prevalent in the
reporting of (recent) clinical events in this section:

Methods
aminids were censored from the organs (idiosyncratic expression of procedure)
was examined for external defects (clinical expression)
at each dose level (procedure)
(Compound Y) was then added dropwise (clinical expression)
was collected and concentrated (clinical sequence)
(data set) calculated from the bootstrap samples 24h after exposure to (fixed expression of
procedure)

The salient expressions of Results sections are predominantly concerned with

qualitative reporting, reformulation and comparison of positive and negative
data. Prepositions such as in which are used to introduce clinical data sets
elsewhere (for example in Abstracts and Titles) are now used in nominal
modifiers expressing empirical observations. Grammatical projections (in
that and to) are replaced by existential impersonal expressions of report
(using there is, there are) or expansion clauses (introduced by when):

Results
There was no significant change in radiosensitivity (qualitative report)
controls did not show RT activity (qualitative report)
mice had a decreased number of formations (quantitative report)
it appears that there are considerable differences (qualitative report)
after the infusion of (clinical framework)
no activity was observed when (X) was incubated (qualitative research report of clinical
process).

Finally, Discussion sections typically express overt evaluation (referring to

we and the use of projections with is) and explanation of data reformulated as
empirical rather than biochemical processes (notably after in). As might be

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expected in research papers, the Discussion section refocuses attention on a

conceptual research model and reformulates empirical observations as
cognitive / research-oriented nouns: models, hypotheses and strategies.
Clause projections in that becomes prevalent (that introduces cognitive
research processes as opposed to to which tends to introduce biochemical
events) and modal verbs are used in widespread hedging:

Discussion
data suggests that reactive oxygen would be important (modified report of results)
This result may be related to bleeding tendency (modified explanation)
It is interesting to note that (modified research report)
increasing data does not result in any further enhancement (qualitative report)
This evidence suggests that (including reformulation)
we have found that (report)

Although I have used the words ‘typical’ or ‘prototypical’ in reference to

these expressions, it is perhaps more accurate to describe this as outstanding
phraseology. I chose the term ‘salient’ to capture the idea that these
expressions are only typical of those elements of style which are in some way
deviant from the rest of the corpus. This is because the Wordlist comparison
emphasises extreme differences in the corpus, and although concordance
analysis does suggest some similarities, it sheds little light on phrases which
may be used consistently from one section to the next. The expressions listed
above are in fact untypical, at least in respect to the corpus as a whole,
although they are of course prototypical of the section of the text which they
represent. It has to be noted therefore that a degree of potential consistency
may have been overlooked by the large-scale statistical analysis of
differences in the corpus.
Although grammatical collocations are useful for identifying longer
stretches of phraseology, it has not yet been proven that they represent the
overriding phraseology of the text as a whole. The listing I present above
represents an extreme generalisation and it is difficult to gauge from this the
proportion of any one individual text which may be made up of prototypical
or outstanding phraseology. In particular, it is important to relate these
findings above to individual texts. To examine this dimension of text
analysis, I have annotated below a Discussion section from one article:
“Bioreversible Protection for the Phospho Group”, a paper donated to the
corpus by the lead-author S. Freeman and originally published in the Journal
of the Chemical Society (Vol.13, 1991). A rough indication of the extent to
which such a text conforms to the typical lexico-grammar of the corpus can
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be shown by graphically identifying those items mentioned as salient in the

PSC in bold, and at the same time indicating lexical items which are usually
collocations of salient items in the corpus (underlined). (Triangle brackets are
used to separate phrases found in the general phraseology from those which
appear to be untypical. Thus bold items outside triangle brackets indicate
non-typical uses of grammatical items identified in the corpus):

Comparison of typical PSC phraseology with a pharmaceutical Discussion section.

<The ready removal of the 4-acetoxybenzyl groups> with carboxyesterase

<suggests that the 4-acyloxybenzyl diesters may be useful bioreversible
derivatives of the phospho group>. <The lower reactivity of the monoester>
with carboxyesterase <when compared with the diester>, <could be exploited>
to provide <a sustained release of parent drug>. In theory, once inside the cell,
the lipophilic diester would readily <yield the anionic monoester>, which
being charged <would be trapped> and hence serve as <a reservoir for the
parent drug>. <This bioreversible protecting group could also have applications
in synthesis>, with the phospho moiety being liberated under very mild
conditions avoiding <the common methods of high pressure hydrogenation>,3
strong acid14 or trimethylsilylbromide.15
Although the products <derived from the phospho group of the diester (1) are
known>, the fate of the benzyl group <is more complex> with only ~< 30% of
the product derived from the proposed carbonium ion> being present as 4-
hydroxybenzyl alcohol <at early time points>. Instead of reacting with water,
<the carbonium ion may be trapped by another nucleophile>, and possibilities
include the enzyme, products or buffer. <The reaction profile for the
decomposition of triester (1) with carboxyesterase is very similar to that of
monoester (2)> (Figure 1). For (1), <two equivalents of the carbonium ion> are
generated, which <does not lower catalytic efficiency>, <this suggesting that
this intermediate does not react with enzyme>. <In a related reaction16 the
benzyl carbonium ion generated from the solvolysis of diphenyl benzyl
phosphate in phenol> is trapped by electrophilic aromatic substitution <to give
2- and 4-benzylphenol>. <An analogous reaction of the 4-
hydroxybenzylcarbonium ion> with 4-hydroxybenzyl alcohol would give 3-(4’-
hydroxybenzyl)-4-hydroxybenzyl alcohol, however the 1H n.m.r. spectrum
only suggested 1,4- disubstituted products. To investigate <the involvement of
the buffer> <the reaction of (1)> with <5 units of carboxyesterase> <was
repeated using 0.01 M phosphate buffer>. <At all time points more than 90% of
the carbonium ion was trapped as 4-hydroxybenzyl alcohol> and <this result
suggests that> with the original 0.1 M buffer, <inorganic phosphate can
compete> with water to trap the carbonium ion. Although <we have yet to
prepare a standard>, unassigned peaks <in the n.m.r. spectra of the reaction
mixture> with 0.1M buffer are dP 3.72 ppm and dH 7.26 (2H, d, JHH 8.4),
6.81 (2H, d, JHH 8.4) and 4.64 (2H, d, JPH 5.4) consistent with
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4- hydroxybenzyl phosphate, which <has an approximate half life of 1 h.>

<The monoanion of benzyl phosphate> <is reported to hydrolyse> with P-O
cleavage with <a half-life of 86 h at 75.6 oC and pH> 7.17,18 <The higher
reactivity of 4-hydroxybenzyl phosphate suggests a change in mechanism>,
with the electron-donating hydroxy group promoting C-O cleavage. Studies are
in progress to optimise <the stability and bioactivation of the 4-acyloxybenzyl
phosphodiesters>, <for both drug delivery and as a synthetic method>, by
altering <the nature of the acyl group>. The potential problems associated with
<the release of a highly reactive benzyl carbonium ion <have been outlined>,6
<and methods to trap this intermediate> internally are being investigated.

This visual identification of collocations allows us to contrast those features

that are typical of cancer research articles in general (the corpus) with
features which appear to be distinctive in the style of this particular text. It
can be seen that approximately 30% of the text (151 items out of 496) is not
involved in the typical phraseology identified in our main corpus analysis. At
the same time, this visualisation shows that many collocations run into each
other and are interdependent. Any two bold items included in the same
brackets appear to share lexical collocations, and presumably also collocate
as an extended expression. Such sequences of interlocking items are termed
collocational cascades (Gledhill 1995a): collocational patterns which extend
from a node to a collocate and on again to another node (in other words,
chains of shared collocates).
What is of interest in terms of genre analysis is the extent to which this
text differs from the corpus-based norm. The Discussion section observed
here has features of language which are typical of other sections (such as a
high number of projecting clauses). But there are also features which are very
untypical, including expansion clauses introduced by to (as a synonym of ‘in
order to’) in dependent clauses signaling a circumstantial aim or
consequence. This feature does not occur prominently in other Discussion
sections or in fact any other section in the corpus (Introductions favour to-
complement clauses or projections, such as It is important to..., The aim was
to...). The text also uses an unexpectedly large number of non-finite clauses
after with (in an expansion + ing). However, the most striking feature of this
text is the number of reduced relative clauses: mild conditions [[avoiding the
common methods of high pressure hydrogenation... ]], the phospho moiety
[[being liberated...]], yield the anionic monoester [[which being charged...]].
The final example here involves the pronoun which, which happens to be the
17th most salient grammatical item in the Discussions subcorpus (468 uses
out of 1422). This suggests that non-restricted relative clauses are also typical
of other Discussion sections. This differs from Abstracts, which use explicit
(non-reduced) relative pronouns (who, that) more often in defining relative
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clauses attached to a noun. In other words, Abstracts use restricted relative

constructions and tend to reformulate and summarise findings first presented
and evaluated elsewhere, usually in Results sections. Discussion sections, on
the other hand, prefer to use dependent clauses which add new information,
extending the thematic range of the clause as a whole. Reduced relative
clauses such as the ones we find here do not appear to be frequent in other
Discussion sections however (only five –ing verb forms appear in the first
1000 salient items in that subcorpus). Thus reduced dependent –ing clauses
and dependent circumstantial clauses introduced by to (‘in order to’) appear
to be an idiosyncratic feature of the individual style of this text rather than a
feature of the genre as a whole.

One of the more fundamental findings to emerge in our study is that the
phraseology in the corpus tends to correspond very consistently to a small set
of dominant semantic categories. In the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus
most lexical items were found to belong to four main process types:
RESEARCH, EMPIRICAL, CLINICAL and BIOCHEMICAL. These four
dimensions form a continuum in which they represent the relative
involvement of the author in the scientific activity (either in experimentation
or writing up). RESEARCH processes can be seen as the most overt
expressions of an author’s mental or behavioural involvement, and
BIOCHEMICAL processes are seen as the most distant from the author
(representing a chemical, material process with no overt external agent).

Increasing ‘autonomy’ Increasing ‘intervention’

RESEARCH RESEARCH
↓ ↑
EMPIRICAL EMPIRICAL
↓ ↑
CLINICAL CLINICAL
↓ ↑
BIOCHEMICAL BIOCHEMICAL

As might be expected, these semantic categories correspond indirectly to the

fundamental processes identified in Halliday’s (1985) grammar of transitivity
(the main processes in the general language are: material, relational, verbal,
mental, behavioural, existential). As with Halliday’s terms, our process types
are open to reformulation as grammatical metaphors (for example, processes
expressed as events etc). Although the terminology does not correspond
directly, it can be seen that the process types identified in the corpus can be
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realised as entities (prototypically nouns), qualities (prototypically

adjectives), events (prototypically verbs) and circumstances (prototypically
adverbs and prepositional groups).
Thus semantic categories emerged at all points in the corpus analysis as
collocates of grammatical items and longer stretches of phraseology. Such
‘clusters’ are a well-documented feature of collocation, and are often seen to
coincide with small changes in grammatical formulation (Sinclair 1991,
Carter 1997). For example, in Methods sections (but not elsewhere) the past
passive phraseology <were + past participle> involves mostly clinical verbs
(were sliced, incubated, filtered) or empirical verbs with associated
prepositions (were increased at, identified as, determined with). Yet the
passive in other sections is expressed in the simple or perfective present
tense, and is dominated by research process verbs (is believed to be, are
observed, is concluded that). A simple interrelation between lexical items and
grammatical collocations can be seen in the framework <were _ by X> which
involves only statistical tests: X were analysed by Student’s t-test, while the
framework <were _ with Y> involves only instruments of methods: Y were
determined with NMR spectroscopy. Another example from the PSC involves
the interdependence of verb form and phraseology. As we have seen in a
discussion of there is / there was (in the analysis of the adverb / pronoun
‘there’), statements of given fact about biochemical entities are likely to be in
the present tense (indirect observations), while statements involving research
and empirical processes are likely to be in the past tense (direct
observations). However, some evidence suggests that the phraseology is
constrained on a more specific lexical level. For example we saw above that
the subject of a past tense phrasal verb ‘led to’ is always a research-oriented
process (these observations led to...) while the subject of the present tense
form ‘leads to’ is always a biochemical or empirical process (response to
DMT damage leads to...). Thus, it is also possible that tense correlates with
lexical and semantic categories as well as the broader rhetorical
generalisations postulated by linguists such as Oster (1981) and Malcolm
(1987). The general implication may be that grammatical features which are
often seen in terms of open or free choice are in fact determined as obligatory
parts of a complex, extended lexical expression, as first posited by Sinclair
(1991)..
The principle of a lexico-grammatical system becomes immediately
apparent when one examines the middle ground between lexical and
grammatical items, including high frequency lexical items and what are
known as non-technical words. I have shown elsewhere that non-technical
lexical items in science writing are involved in highly specific and consistent
grammatical systems. These items are used in a lexical sub-system that may

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be independent of the general language. For example, in Gledhill (1997) I

examined the lexical phraseology of high frequency nouns and verbs in the
corpus. I found that the collocational patterns of verbs such as show and
demonstrate display very consistent grammatical differences. Show is
typically involved with non-finite projections of the type X has been shown
to {+ empirical finding}, while demonstrated is used with a simple
complement or a finite projection it has been demonstrated that {+ finite
statement of biochemical fact}. But a further unexpected difference involves
the polarity of the two verbs: demonstrated regularly introduces negative
results, either expressed as failure (we have failed to demonstrate X... ) or as
a simple negative (we have demonstrated that X is not effective in the
treatment of Y). The verb is therefore co-selected as part of an extended
expression. Putting it another way, the verb demonstrated is ‘reserved’ for
the expression of negative results, almost as though the verb is used as part of
an extended communicative signal and exists in opposition to more neutral
verbs such as show.
These instances are complicated by the fact that in a similar corpus of
scientific texts in French, the usual translation equivalents of these verbs
(montrer, démontrer) do not display the same lexico-grammatical properties
(Gledhill 1999). The French system involves a verb which has no translation
equivalent in English préciser, whose use lies somewhere between indicate
(French indiquer) and show. The meaning of the verb demonstrate in
scientific English involves a notion of contrast (not necessarily negative
contrast). But there is no such nuance in the French use of the verb
démontrer. Our understanding of these verbs must therefore depend on our
deeper recognition of the underlying phraseological impact of the word as
part of an extended expression. While one might expect a general underlying
pattern to emerge across different languages within the discourse community
of scientists, it appears that French and English science writing may have
developed their own specific discourses, with a variety of lexical items
employed to express very sophisticated but also very consistent
phraseological nuances. If these observations on phraseological patterns do
not correspond with the general language, then translation appears to be an
more difficult task than is ordinarily assumed, since even non-technical
lexical items can be seen to be non-equivalent on a basic phraseological
level. Although further work is necessary on inter-cultural and inter-
discoursal aspects of collocation, it is clear that these features of the lexico-
grammar are systematic but also unpredictable. A collocational pattern is
unpredictable in the sense that a native speaker is largely unaware of the
consistency of the pattern. However, speakers may be aware of the general
phraseological effects of the word, and may associate the phraseological

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patterns of the word subconsciously with its connotative meanings. Such a

principle is the basis of recent corpus-based dictionary projects, as pointed
out by Sinclair (1991).
Generally speaking, linguists such as Hunston and Francis (1998) have
found that changes in grammatical sequence tend to involve the formation of
coherent, consistent groups of lexical collocates. Such correspondences
between global grammatical choice and lexical phraseology are fundamental
features of Halliday’s notion of lexico-grammar (Halliday 1985). As Francis
(1993) puts it:

As we build up and refine the semantic sets associated with a structure, we

move closer to a position where we can compute a grammar of the typical
meanings that human communication encodes, and recognise the untypical
and hence foregrounded meanings as we come across them. (Francis
1993:155).

We have seen in chapter 2 that there is a body of linguistic theory that sees
such patterns as central to the way discourse is construed, or to reformulate
Halliday (1985), how we build and interpret the world through discourse. The
neo-Firthian view of language set out throughout this book sees the semantics
of the word as textually distributed and syntax as intimately linked with
lexical knowledge. In the specific context of cancer research articles,
knowledge of phraseology involves knowing which tense to use in expressing
biochemical and research processes and, to give a very specific example,
even a subconscious knowledge of duality in the discipline in the use of basic
co-ordinating conjunctions. Phraseological knowledge can be seen as a
central factor in the process of writing and reading in this specialist field. In
this regard, Francis (1993) has argued that such knowledge is a key
mechanism by which we move from ideas to linguistic form:

As communicators we do not proceed by selecting syntactic structures and

independently choosing lexis to slot into them. Instead we have concepts to
convey and communicative choices to make which require central lexical
items, and these choices find themselves syntactic structures in which they
can be said comfortably and grammatically (Francis 1993:122)

Given this view, that meanings acquire their own wordings, we can therefore
conceive of the broader system of phraseology as the set of linguistic forms
motivated by rhetorical aims and which further shape the discourse. It
follows that the collocational patterns we have identified are formulated in
previous text and must have a role in the processing of the text as a whole.
The intertextual function of collocation is therefore apparent. Clearly any

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changes in phraseology introduced by the author or any deviations from the

collocational cascade must have consequences for concepts throughout a
running text, as we have demonstrated on several occasions in this book in
the analysis of grammatical reformulation.

4. The Role of Grammatical Items in Collocation.

Although grammatical items tend to occupy similar ranks of frequency in a

variety of texts and word counts (for example those based on large text
corpora such as the British National Corpus and the Bank of English), this
study claims that their use is more predictable in terms of context and
function than has been previously suggested. This is because any variations
in basic word lists come into sharp focus when the collocational behaviour of
these items is considered at a further stage of analysis. It appears from our
analysis above that conventional formulations remain consistent within each
section of the research article, and that each salient grammatical item tends to
contract a different set of collocations from one subsection to the next.
One reason for this is that the communicative goals and semantic concerns
of the genre lead to a delimited set of linguistic expressions. When these
goals change, the phraseological resources of the text change at the same
time. Collocations involving grammatical items are thus consistent indicators
of long-range relations between texts. They are usually stable from one text
to the next (i.e. within the subcorpus of Abstracts or Introductions etc.), but
differ from one section of the article to another. Collocational variation
across rhetorical sections affects many areas of grammar and discourse in the
corpus, largely because the items that are found to be salient cover a number
of grammatical categories. This is not a trivial observation. If the statistical
counts are well conceived and accurate, then the rhetorical sections of
research articles appear to be very different in terms of a wide variety of
grammatical constructions - a point not often realised in those corpus studies
which classify the whole text as a single register or text-type (a recent
exception has been Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1998).
The lexico-grammatical patterns of research articles show that collocation
is not an accidental property but a fundamental characteristic of the genre, as
central as such features as rhetorical moves, thematic progression and clause
structure. It is interesting to observe that these global features of text tended
to dominate the discussion of genre analysis before the advent of computer-
based corpus linguistics (for example, Nwogu 1989, Wikberg 1990,
Mauranen 1993). It now appears that corpus-based studies have shifted the
emphasis of analysis to the micro-level of the genre. It is now possible to
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posit generic features of a text with much more certainty than earlier work.
There has recently been a considerable amount of research on lexical
collocation in technical genres (as in the work of Howarth 1996 and Pearson
1998) or on syndromes of inter-related grammatical categories in the
comparison of broader registers (Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1998). Only a
small number of studies have begun to examine the distribution of
grammatical collocations in a specialised genre, and none have established a
comparative analysis of collocation in sub-sections of a text. While the study
presented here shares similar methods with many computer-based studies of
authorship and information retrieval (for example Ager et al. 1979,
Moskovitch and Caplan 1979, Harris 1985, Phillips 1989, Ahmad et al. 1991
and Ide 1993), few of these have focused on grammatical collocation as a
means of ‘trawling’ or fishing out the phraseological properties of the text.
The aim of my analysis is therefore to balance those studies of genre which
concentrate on the macro-structure of texts (especially within ESP), and also
to provide an alternative contribution to mainstream work on the language of
science, which has tended to see collocations as an extension of terminology
rather than as a feature of text.
Recent studies of corpora of the general language (Sinclair 1991) have
begun to challenge the traditional way of seeing grammatical items. Whereas
lexical items vary in frequency and distribution across a variety of topics and
genres, high frequency grammatical items are assumed to remain the same.
Yet much of the evidence I have presented in this book suggests that this
picture is misleading. The interaction between a grammatical item and a
cluster of semantically-related lexical items suggests that grammatical words
should be seen not only as closed-class or high-frequency items, but also as
the fundamental elements of organisation in phraseological units. Many
grammatical items do of course lack propositional meaning when considered
in isolation, but it is important to consider the role of grammatical words
within longer phrases and their function in the grammatical reformulation of
the text. I have suggested above that grammatical items provide an efficient
way of arriving at a description of the most typical phraseology of the genre.
And we have also seen that grammatical items and grammatical
reformulation have an important role to play in Halliday’s theory of
grammatical metaphor, that is to say in the formation of textual meaning.
When considered from this perspective, it becomes clear that grammatical
items and their attendant phraseology have an important role to play in the
textual and interpersonal functions of the text.
We have seen that grammatical items are present in the most fundamental
phraseology of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus, including such basic
expressions as we conclude that..., [compound X] has been shown to

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[dimerize, express, flip...]..., these findings demonstrate that.... These

correspond to Nattinger and DeCarrico’s (1992) notion of the lexical phrase.
Rather than expressing propositional information through terminology, these
expressions represent the fundamental style of the text and have specific
rhetorical functions. Their textual roles range from reformulating as
grammatical metaphors, signalling modality, forming hedged and modal
phrases, and refocusing previous discourse. Such expressions are not often
seen as prototypical examples of science writing. However, the corpus
evidence suggests that grammatical items within lexical phrases are the most
stable features of language in the research article. This is partly a
consequence of the processes of grammatical metaphor I cited above, but it
can also be seen that many of these expressions have very specific
phraseological properties which differ markedly from their general-language
equivalents.
I have concentrated throughout this book on grammatical collocation
(grammatical items collocating with lexical clusters), collocational
frameworks (collocations involving more than one grammatical item) and
colligation (collocation between grammatical categories). These forms can be
contrasted with lexical collocation, for example nominals such as total
synthesis and active physiological management. Lexical collocation is an
important feature of scientific terminology. However, lexical collocations do
not appear to have the same range or distribution of use as those expressions
which involve a grammatical item. As we have argued above, grammatical
words play an important role in reformulation and re-wording. Halliday
identifies several instances of grammatical metaphors, and all happen to
involve grammatical items: the movement of planets, the instability of
diamond, resulted in brake failure, leads to X..., the fact of Y... (1998: 309-
210). It appears that many features of grammatical metaphor involve
prepositions, and prepositions have caught the attention of linguists in
previous studies (Sastri 1968). This general form of reformulation accounts
for the high frequency of prepositions in the PSC word list when compared
with the general language (c.f. Appendix 1). We have seen similar instances
in a number of areas in the corpus, in particular in impersonal projecting
clauses (with conjunctive that and to) and the passive (involving forms of the
verb to be). In addition, the mechanisms of ‘alternation’ in science texts were
identified as important processes by Pettinari (1982). These processes
correspond to Sager et al.’s (1980) observation that while certain terms can
involve basic grammatical reformulation (drug pusher / a pusher of drugs,
measles vaccine / a vaccine for measles), other more established terms appear
to be grammatically fixed (jet engine / ?the engine of a jet, long-term
memory / ?memory for the long term). This is also reflected in Fischer’s

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(1998) discussion of neologism and lexical change in the general language, in

which the range of successful nominal compounds which involve lexical
modifiers (mind-bending complexity, grant-maintained school, wide-bodied
jet) tends to be greater than compounds involving complex grammatical
relations (just-in-time, hands-on, us-versus-them). Grammatical collocations
thus seem to be central to style and reformulation in the text, while lexical
collocations (especially nominal compounds) are represent a system of more-
or-less frozen established terms.
In her analysis of the reformulation of idiomatic expressions, Moon (1996)
finds that of all the items used in common expressions, grammatical items
tend to be the most fixed. This is a departure from the traditional
lexicological view of a phrase or fixed expression, in which lexical words are
seen as the most useful entries for classification in dictionaries. Conversely,
many of the examples in the previous chapter show that while the number of
lexical items in a cluster is variable, the grammatical items in a collocational
framework are integral parts of the expression. As I noted in chapter two, it is
clear that grammatical items and high frequency ‘non-technical’ words are
clues for decoding the scientific research article, and may provide a
significant feature of recognition for expert readers. In a study on the
readability of scientific texts Clarke and Nation (1980) point out that for non-
expert readers, grammatical and high frequency lexical items are the only
items they are able to recognise, and their understanding of the text will
depend on a coherent reading of collocational patterns in what is essentially
an approximation of a cloze-test.
Yet this view of high frequency items has not often been recognised, as I
argued in chapter 3. Even Halliday and Hasan (1976) claimed that high
frequency lexical items such as go, man, know or way ‘can hardly be said to
contract significant cohesive relations, because they go with anything at all.’
(1976:290). They also claimed that ‘the higher the frequency of a lexical
item... the smaller the part it plays in lexical cohesion in texts’ (1976:290).
Many linguists appear to similarly believe that higher frequency words
(grammatical items) are of little interest in the meaning creation of the text,
and most large scale analyses of corpora tend to eliminate grammatical items
by imposing ‘stop-lists’. Yet I hope to have demonstrated that grammatical
items play a important role in a number of discourse features of the text
(especially in the guise of lexical phrases). Although admittedly Halliday and
Hasan were talking about long-range features of textuality, I have argued that
every grammatical item displays a rich range of collocational patterns, from
relatively variable collocational frameworks, to lexical phrases and fixed
idiomatic expressions. These phrases in turn have patterns of phraseological
use in the text which extend beyond the boundaries of the clause, an issue

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which serves to enhance rather than distract from Halliday and Hasan’s
notion of textual cohesion.
It is worth admitting at this point that some features of phraseology which
do not involve isolated grammatical items may have escaped our statistical
trawling. It is fair to say that the reduced relative clauses mentioned in our
sample Discussion section above would be missed by a preliminary analysis
using Wordlist. Although reduced relatives involve a complex syntax and
consistent morphology, this is one aspect of lexical collocation which is
likely to be missed by our surface-based analysis. Generally speaking, there
is no a priori reason why lexical collocations should not form part of the
predominant phraseology of a textual genre. There is also no reason why
morphological features of the text can not be taken into account. However,
the fact remains that grammatical collocation is involved in an immense
portion (if not a majority) of the typical kinds of expression to be found in a
particular text.
These observations suggest that although collocational patterns must be an
important first step in genre analysis, a closer reading of the text is also
required. Typical grammatical phraseology clearly needs to be compared
with other important lexical expressions. As we have seen in the sample text
above, non-typical formulations are likely to have significant roles to play in
the text. Another example from the corpus involves the unusual sentence
adverb ‘Forefront’ in the Introduction of Text JNCI: Forefront in this role is
tumor necrosis factor TNF... Since the text is written by a native-speaker, it
might be assumed that this is a rather marked expression, perhaps used to
signal that this sentence, above all others, is worthy of notice (in popularised
versions of this article TNF is hailed as a new discovery in our understanding
of cancer, as we see below). Such interesting and significant features of the
text should not be ignored, as they are also significant in terms of the text as a
whole. But it is also clear that the idiosyncratic nature of individual texts can
be only be demonstrated by establishing in the first instance those elements
which are generic or salient in the broader corpus and ultimately in the
general language as a whole.
Such exceptions to the rule also indicate that while the global analysis of
collocation is essential in order to establish the major idiomatic
characteristics of the corpus, statistical collocations can only be considered to
be a limited area of style in which all the texts appear to overlap. Thus
generic collocations are important in the sense that they lay bare those areas
of the text which are truly individual or deviant. Such considerations have
long been recognised in the statistical analysis of authorship (in science
writing, Harris 1985), in forensic linguistics (Gibbons 1994) and studies on
information retrieval (Sparck-Jones 1971, Choueka et al. 1985, Frohman

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1990, Busch 1992). Once it is accepted that generic collocation is an

important first step in describing the fundamental characteristics of a text, it
appears increasingly unacceptable to adopt traditional approaches of literary
analysis (and some discourse analysis), which stereotypically analyse the
‘special’ characteristics of a text without reference to a general phraseology
of the genre, and ultimately of the language. In many ways this principle
points out the insufficiency of my present study, and suggests that more
related genres must be taken into account, such as a statistical comparison
with a control corpus of general scientific texts and ultimately with a general
corpus of English. This leads us naturally on to a discussion of future
possibilities of research.

5. New Research Directions.

As I suggested in the previous section, the research set out in this book leaves
a number of questions unanswered. It is not clear, for example, how
phraseology in science is determined and propagated within the discourse
community. There is no indication as yet whether the phraseological patterns
we have seen in a very specific genre are replicated in disciplines other than
cancer research. And there has been no space to discuss the historical
dimension of phraseology. For example, a collocational account would
certainly enhance the useful work carried out already by Biber and Finegan
(1988) and Atkinson (1992) on the history of the research article genre. I
have suggested above that the language of science can be defined in terms of
mechanisms of reformulation and phraseology, in particular by the
underlying tendency towards grammatical metaphor. But it must also be the
case that the research article creates its own new phraseology, and that one
aspect of successful research lies in the extent to which the new phraseology
has been able to penetrate (or be accepted by) the existing discourse and be
replicated as part of the established order. Studies such as Choueka et al.
(1985) and Busch (1992) argue that slight variation in the use of common
lexical collocations is an important indicator of novelty in technical writing.
This suggests a future research programme which explores the possibility that
language has a role to play in the natural selection of scientific ideas. I have
previously proposed a phraseological view of logogenesis (the evolution of
phrases within the text, Gledhill 1997), and would like to suggest that future
work be applied to ontological development (the acquisition of phraseology
in the individual) and phylogenic development (the evolution of phraseology
over time).

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Similarly, very little is known about the long-range cohesive functions of

collocation. While rhetorical structure allows the reader to predict what is to
be said on a broader scale, phraseological patterns may also be involved in
what I term the indexical function of the scientific text. That is to say, the use
of devices for browsing and skimming through a text. In their studies of
signalling and use of rhetorical structure, Swales (1981), Nwogu (1989) and
Sharp (1989) found that predictable elements of rhetorical structure and
visual format help readers to identify which parts of the text to jump to, and
to guess the content of conventional areas of the texts. But while such
analysis helps to describe the linear reading of texts, it does not explain how
scientists make a coherent account of a partially read text, or how parts of the
text may be considered cohesive even at some distance apart, a notion that we
have seen in the work of Hoey (1991). In the light of Dopkins and Morris’s
(1992) work on eye-fixation in reading, it may be possible to examine the
extent to which collocations and other fixed expressions attract (or repulse)
the reader’s attention, thus having an important role in text processing. So in
addition to key words, rhetorical structure and graphic format, it is worth
considering whether grammatical parallelism, conventionalised phrases and
cohesive networks might also be used as long range cohesive devices in the
process of reading. Although work on the semiotics of non-verbal features of
the scientific research article has recently been carried out by Tarasova
(1993) and Lemke (1998), it may be worthwhile to examine the relationship
between phraseology and the non-verbal features of scientific discourse.
Another fruitful area of research may lie in the phraseology of scientific
popularisation. While there have been many studies of the popularisation of
science (Nwogu and Bloor 1991, Myers 1991, Varttala 1999), few have
concentrated on phraseology. Popularisation also constitutes a vast range of
genres and text types, and extends beyond the stereotypical kind of text one
normally associates with popular science (for example the scientific
blockbuster, as explored by Fuller 1998). I have carried out a preliminary
analysis of journalistic accounts of one of my expert informant’s recent
‘breakthroughs’ (Gledhill forthcoming). As noted in section II.4, the
Pharmaceutical Sciences department had a number of breakthroughs relating
to the work of the microbiologist, MT. It turns out in fact that scientific
breakthroughs are planned. The local and national press are informed at
regular intervals of what to report and when. This degree of manipulation and
interdependence between the press and the researchers changes our
perspective on popularisation, and is interesting not in terms of the
simplification of ideas, but in the way in which scientific discourse is used
for rhetorical purposes.

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It is possible to compare the phraseology of highly specialised texts such

as JNCI with a corpus of articles such as the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Cancer
discovery by farmer scientist’. My initial findings suggest that popular
accounts of scientific research are heavily influenced by the language of the
scientists’ reports. Interestingly, most reports devote only one or two lines to
the actual ‘science’ of the story (the rest of the article concentrates on issues
that are never dealt with in the research articles, such as the local angle and
funding). When the press does explain the science, it appears that there is
little effort to simplify the language involved. It is as though the journalist
switches genres within the text. Here is the original formulation of the main
scientific breakthrough from the Biochemistry Journal:

The reason for depletion of host tissues is not known, but is thought to arise
from differences in metabolism in the tumour-bearing state. (Biochemistry
Journal)

From 12 newspaper clippings in the local and national press, the first
sentence of the Independent suffices to show the processes of reformulation
which may take place:

A substance found in fish oil is to be used in the treatment of cancer,

following new evidence that it can shrink solid tumours and may halt the
dramatic weight loss associated with the disease. (The Independent)

The report displays several examples of phraseology which would not be out
of place in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus: nominal compaction (the
use of ‘of’ and reduced relative clauses) as well as hedging with ‘may’. In
addition, there are a number of grammatical metaphors (underlined),
expressing impersonal ideas (treatment of..., new evidence that..., weight loss
associated with...).. There is therefore a striking similarity between this
discourse and that of the original research articles. Since the journalists
themselves use press releases produced by the cancer research charities, this
is presumably reflected in the language of the popular report. Despite similar
phraseological features, the press reports are never quite the same as each
other, which leads to an interesting range of variable expressions. The
consequences of this are not yet clear. But it would seem to suggest that
stereotypical features of scientific writing such as nominalisation,
passivisation and general complexity of grammatical metaphor are just as
much a part of the popularised genre of science writing as the original
technical text. Science writing becomes less bound to an original text or
genre, and takes on a more abstract existence as a mode of meaning.

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

Beyond the corpus analysis carried out in this study, there is further work to
be done in genre and discourse analysis in general. Despite the immense
growth of specialised language corpora, there remains considerable scope for
the analysis of collocation in both descriptive and applied linguistics. Very
little work has been done for example on the comparative analysis of lexico-
grammars in languages other than English. While much work in corpus
linguistics has recently been devoted to language teaching (for example,
Johns and King 1993, Van Halteren 1994), Barnbrook (1996) points out that
corpora are long way from being properly exploited as reference tools in
general linguistics. There is in contrast a strong tradition of corpus analysis in
literary and authorship studies (more recently including Potter 1991 and Ide
1993) and there have been interesting developments in forensic linguistics
and in the automatic detection of plagiarism (Coulthard 1994). But in each
case there remains much to be said about the comparative analysis of
collocation and phraseology. A large text corpus produced by second-
language learners of English has been examined extensively by Granger
(1996), and this research has shown that it is possible to examine
collocational differences between apprentice writers and professionals in
order to pin-point learners’ difficulties and design teaching materials. A
corpus of ‘apprenticeship’ texts may not only be a useful analytical tool in
monitoring the linguistic progress of apprentice writers, but also in analysing
how texts are edited and changed in their process of production, and how
coherence develops chronologically throughout the text (such work has been
taken on by Kouřilova, forthcoming). And in this respect, there are many
dimensions of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus which remain unexplored,
for example the potential differences between single-author and team-
authored texts, between native-speaker and non-native texts, or between
papers on biology and those on structural chemistry. These fascinating
possibilities belong, of course, to another book.

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VI. Appendix A: Frequency List.

The Most Frequent Words in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus

(First 100 Items)1.

1 THE 29122 (5.7%) 36 AFTER 1139 (0.2%)

2 OF 21309 (4.1%) 37 HAVE 1127 (0.2%)
3 AND 14610 (2.8%) 38 ML 1097 (0.2%)
4 IN 14349 (2.8%) 39 N (nitrogen)1076 (0.2%)
5 TO 8631 (1.7%) 40 X (algebraic)1045 (0.2%)
6 A () 8125 (1.6%) 41 IT 1006 (0.2%)
7 WAS 6146 (1.2%) 42 P (pressure) 992 (0.2%)
8 WITH 5543 (1.1%) 43 M (mol./metre)973 (0.2%)
9 FOR 5224 (1.0%) 44 WE 972 (0.2%)
10 WERE 5162 (1.0%) 45 BEEN 966 (0.2%)
11 BY 4176 (0.8%) 46 TUMORS 903 (0.2%)
12 THAT 3352 (0.6%) 47 MICE 902 (0.2%)
13 AT 3287 (0.6%) 48 ALSO 884 (0.2%)
14 IS 3169 (0.6%) 49 ACTIVITY 880 (0.2%)
15 AS 3061 (0.6%) 50 G (gramme)878 (0.2%)
16 CELLS 3016 (0.6%) 51 THAN 822 (0.1%)
17 FROM 2982 (0.6%) 52 D (deuterium)821 (0.1%)
18 C (celsius) 2303 (0.4%) 53 USED 790 (0.1%)
19 OR 2290 (0.4%) 54 HUMAN 784 (0.1%)
20 ON 2182 (0.4%) 55 ALL 783 (0.1%)
21 I (iodine) 2029 (0.4%) 56 BETWEEN780 (0.1%)
22 THIS 1197 (0.4%) 57 DNA 778 (0.1%)
23 ET 1987 (0.4%) 58 TABLE 774 (0.1%)
24 H (hydrogen)1961 (0.4%) 59 FIG 757 (0.1%)
25 AL 1933 (0.3%) 60 RESULTS 755 (0.1%)
26 ARE 1920 (0.3%) 61 USING 752 (0.1%)
27 CELL 1905 (0.3%) 62 PROTEIN 751 (0.1%)
28 BE 1825 (0.3%) 63 HAS 741 (0.1%)
29 NOT 1798 (0.3%) 64 SHOWN 731 (0.1%)
30 AN 1438 (0.3%) 65 MIN 725 (0.1%)
31 WHICH 1422 (0.3%) 66 DATA 715 (0.1%)
32 THESE 1392 (0.3%) 67 BOTH 713 (0.1%)
33 L (liquid) 1299 (0.2%) 68 GROWTH 707 (0.1%)
34 TUMOR 1235 (0.2%) 69 OBSERVED703 (0.1%)
35 S (seconds) 1203 (0.2%) 70 STUDY 701 (0.1%)
1
Single letters (e.g. C, I, H) are left in the count as many of these represent chemical or
mathematical symbols. There is some ambiguity over ‘A’ which may in some cases
represent a determiner, the symbol ‘α‘, or the symbol ‘A’ for relative atomic mass. ‘I’
always represents iodine, or ‘electric current’ or some mathematical variable in this
corpus.
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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

71 NO 694 (0.1%) 86 MORE 612 (0.1%)

72 B () 683 (0.1%) 87 ONLY 611 (0.1%)
73 ANALYSIS 682 (0.1%) 88 T (time / temp) 609 (0.1%)
74 TWO 682 (0.1%) 89 TREATMENT 606 (0.1%)
75 OTHER 673 (0.1%) 90 GROUP 599 (0.1%)
76 BUT 663 (0.1%) 91 EACH 595 (0.1%)
77 MAY 658 (0.1%) 92 PATIENTS 584 (0.1%)
78 FOUND 651 (0.1%) 93 DOSE 582 (0.1%)
79 FIGURE 650 (0.1%) 94 EXPRESSION 582 (0.1%)
80 EFFECT 649 (0.1%) 95 TIME 578 (0.1%)
81 OBTAINED 640 (0.1%) 96 LINES 573 (0.1%)
82 NORMAL 629 (0.1%) 97 HOWEVER 561 (0.1%)
83 E (emf ) 623 (0.1%) 98 GENE 557 (0.1%)
84 ONE 619 (0.1%) 99 CONTROL 548 (0.1%)
85 MG 618 (0.1%) 100 MM 540 (0.1%)

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 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

VII. Appendix B: Texts Used in the PSC

The Pharmaceutical Sciences Corpus (PSC)

Reference Lists.

Journals are alphabetically listed according to the Science Citation Index mnemonic code
(CCP, CL etc) and not according to title. The Journal’s rank in the SCI (1988) impact factor
table (compared with 1000 other journals) is listed as an approximate indicator of prestige.
The relative size of the journal as a percentage of the corpus is also noted. A Unix-based
word count has been used for this list, where the total corpus is of 150 papers, and 519 201
running words. For each paper one of several field classifications is noted (generally: cancer
research / medicinal chemistry / pharmacology / structural chemistry). Only asterisked
authors (usually the lead writer) are noted in the case of multiple author papers.

A.C. - Angewandte Chimie.

[SCI 1988 Rank=93 Corpus %=0.49]

AC: The Self-assembly of catenated cyclodextrins. [Supramolecular chemistry]

Author: DA, JS Source: author’s ms, forthcoming

B.J. - Biochemistry Journal.

[SCI 1988 Rank=152 Corpus %=0.45]

BJ: Metabolic substrate utilization by tumour and host tissues in cancer

cachexia. [Cancer Histopathology]
Author: MT. Source: Biochem J 277/371 1991

B.J.C. - British Journal of Cancer.

[SCI 1988 Rank=340 Corpus %=5.5]

BJC1:The influence of the schedule and the dose of gemcitabine on the anti- tumour efficacy
in experimental human cancer [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: TB. Source: Brit J. Can
68/1 1993
BJC2:Regulation of cytochrome P450 gene expression in human colon and
breast tumour xenografts [Carcinogenesis] Author: MP, JR. Source: Brit J. Can 65/4
1992
BJC3: Allele loss from 5q21 (APCIMCC) and 18q21 (DCC) and DCC mRNA expression in
breast cancer [Carcinogenesis] Author: GH Source: Brit J. Can 65/5 1992
BJC4:Comparative radioimmunotherapy using intact or F(ab’)2 fragments of 13lI anti- CEA
antibody in a colonic xenograft model [Cancer Radioimmunology] Author: FS. Source:
Brit J. Can 65/6 1992
BJC5:Characterization of n-inedsine-resistant human sarcomas. [Cancer Chemotherapy]
Author: ML, OD,YD. Source: Brit J. Can 65/7 1992
BJC6:Strong HLA-DR expression in large bowel carcinomas is associated with
good prognosis [Etiology/Histopathology] Author: CV, NB, OP. Source: Brit J. Can 65/8
1992
BJC7:Response to adjuvant chemotherapy in primary breast cancer: no
correlation with expression of glutathione S-transferases [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author:
AL. Source: Brit J. Can 68/3 1993
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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

BJC8:pS2 is an independent factor of good prognosis in primary breast

cancer [Etiology/Oncology]
Author: HT. Source: Brit J. Can 68/4 1993
BJC9:Serum pituitary and sex steroid hormone levels in the etiology of prostatic cancer -
a population-based case-control study [Cancer Etiology/ Case study] Author: WP, IT, PL.
Source: Brit J. Can 68/5 1993
BJC10:Expression of group-II phospholipase A2 in malignant and non-
malignant human gastric mucosa [Cancer Immunohistochemistry] Author: WI. Source:
Brit J. Can 68/7 1993
BJC11:Endogenous cortisol exerts antiemetic effect similar to that of
exogenous corticosteroid [Chemotherapy] Author: CY. Source: Brit J. Can 68/9 1993

B.J.P- British Journal of Pharmacology.

[SCI 1988 Rank=84 Corpus %= 1.89]
BJP1:Antiarrhythmic drugs, clofilium and cibenzoline are potent inhibitors of glibenclamide-
sensitive K+ currents in Xenopus oocytes [Pharmacology] Author: TH. Source: B.J. Phar
2/109/3 1991
BJP2: Attenuation of contractions to acetylcholine in canine bronchi by anendogenous nitric
oxide-like substance [Pharmacology] Author: AG. Source: B.J. Phar 4/109/3 1991
BJP3: Enhancement by endothelin-1 of microvascular permeability via the activation of ETA
receptors. [Pharmacology] Author: MT et al. . Source: B.J. Phar 5/109/3 1991

B.M.J. - British Medical Journal.

[SCI 1988 Rank=232 Corpus %=2.153]
BMJ1: The Bristol third stage trial: active versus physiological management of third stage of
labour [Physiological management] Source:Astec corpus
BMJ2:Immunity to rubella in women of childbearing age in the United
Kingdom [Etiology/Virology]
Source: Astec corpus
BMJ3:Adverse neurodevelopmental outcome of moderate neonatal
hypoglycaemia [Physiological management] Source: Astec corpus
BMJ4:Seasonal distribution in conceptions achieved by artificial insemination
by donor [Etiology/Gynacology] Source: Astec corpus
BMJ5: Aspirin and bleeding peptic ulcers in the elderly [Pharmacology] Source: Astec
corpus

CAR - Carcinogenesis.
[SCI 1988 Rank=326 Corpus %=8.475]
CAR1:Sensitivity to tumor promotion of SENCAR and C57BL/6J mice
correlates with oxidative events and DNA damage. [Tumour Promotor Carcinogenesis]
Author: NH. Car. 4/5 1993
CAR2: Ras protooncogene activation of methylene chloride. [Carcinogenesis]
Author: CK. Car. 5/5 1993
CAR3:Characterization of p53 mutations in methylene chloride-induced lung tumors
from B6C3F1 mice [Cancer Histology] Author: NE. Car. 1/6 1993
CAR4:Inhalation exposure to a hepatocarcinogenic concentration of methylene chloride does
not induce sustained replicative DNA synthesis in hepatocytes of female B6C3F1 mice
[Cancer Histopathology] Author: RS. Car. 2/6 1993

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CAR5:Effect of varying exposure regimens on methylene chloride-induced lung

and liver tumors in female B6C3F1 mice. [Chemical Carcinogenesis] Author: FP. Car.
3/6 1993
CAR6:Expression and stability of p53 protein in normal human mammary
epithelial cells. [Tumour Supressor Gene Carcinogenesis] Author: GP. Car. 1/3 1992
CAR7: p53 Mutations in human immortalized epithelial cell lines [Carcinogenesis]
Author: YU. Car. 2/3 1992
CAR8:Protection against N-nitrosodiethylamine and benzo[a]pyrene-
induced forestomach and lung tumorigenesis in A/J mice by green tea. [Cancer
Immunohistochemistry] Author: LG. Car. 3/3 1992
CAR9 Inhibitory effects of curcumin on protein kinase C activity induced by 12-0-
tetradecanoyl-phorbol-13-acetate in NIH 3T3 cells. [Cancer Immunohistochemistry]
Author: MH. Car. 4/3 1992
CAR10 Characterization of highly polar bis- dihydrodiol epoxide-DNA adducts formed after
metabolic activation of dibenz[a,h]anthracene [Carcinogenesis] Author: PR. Car. 5/3
1992

C.C. - Chemical Communications.

[SCI 1988 Rank=360 Corpus %=0.698]
CC: Bioreversible Protection for the Phospho Group: Chemical Stability and Bioactivation of
Di(4-acetoxybenzyl) Methylphosphonate with Carboxyesterase [Structural chemistry]
Author: SF, WJ, AM, DN, WT. J Chem Soc. 13/ 1991

C.C.P. - Cancer Chemotherapy and Pharmacology.

[SCI 1988 Rank=160 Corpus %=11.816]
CCP1:Quantification of the synergistic interaction of edatrexate and cisplatin
in vitro. [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: MP. 31/4 1993
CCP2 Pharmacokinetics of peptichemio in myeloma patients: release of m-L-sarcolysin
in vivo and in vitro. [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: CP. 31/5 1993
CCP3:Prolonged retention of high concentrations of 5-fluorouracil in human
and murine tumors as compared with plasma. [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: MP 31/6
1993
CCP4:Relationship between the melanin content of a human melanoma cell line
and its radiosensitivity and uptake of pimonidazole. [Cancer Radioimmunology]
Author:YW,PS 30/2 1992
CCP5:Phase I clinical and pharmacology study of 502U83 given as a 24-
h continuous intravenous infusion. [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: DD. 30/6 1992
CCP6:Correlation of the in vitro cytotoxicity of ethyldeshydroxysparsomycin
and cisplatin with tne in vivo antitumour activity in murine L121~) leukaemia and two
resistant L1210 subclones. [Cancer Chemotherapy]
Author: EL. 30/4 1992
CCP7:Doxorubicin and local hyperthermia in the microcirculation of
skeletal muscle. [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: AM. 30/3 1992
CCP8:Decreased resistance to N,N-dimethylated anthracyclines in multidrug-
resistant Friend erythroleukemia cells. [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: FJ. 30/1 1992
CCP9:Antitumor activity of the aromatase inhibitor FCE 24928 on DMBA-
induced mammary tumors in ovariectomized rats treated with testosterone.
[Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: IY. 29/6 1992
CCP10: Organ distribution and antitumor activity of free and liposomal doxorubicin injected
into the hepatic artery [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: DJ. 29/5 1992
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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

CCP11: Effect of toremifene on antipyrine elimination in the isolated perfused rat liver.
Author: TD 29/4 1992
CCP12:A limited sampling method for estimation of the carboplatin area under
the HNR curve. Cell-growth inhibition by and cytotoxicity of anthracyclines
in doxorubicin-sensitive and -resistant F4-6 cells. [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: PI.
29/3 1992
CCP13:Pharmacokinetics of 10-ethyl-10-deaza- aminopterin, edatrexate, given weekly
for non- small-cell lung cancer [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: KH. 29/2 1992
CCP14:Phase I clinical evaluation of [SP-4-3(R)]-[1,1-cyclobutanedicarboxylato(2-)] (2-
methyl-1,4-butanediamine-N,Nl) platinum in patients with metastatic solid
tumors [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: VE. 29/1 1992
CCP15:Phase II study of high-dose ifosfamide in hepatocellular carcinoma
[Cancer Chemotherapy]
Author: RW. 28/6 1992
CCP16: Ifosfamide in advanced epidermoid head and neck cancer [Cancer Chemotherapy]
Author: SI. 28/5 1992

C.L.- Cancer Letters.

[SCI 1988 Rank=251 Corps %=5.643]

CL1:Purification and analysis of a human sarcoma associated antigen

[Cancer Chemotherapy]
Author: SG. 151/216 1 / 1993
CL2:Potentiation of butyrate-induced differentiation in human colon tumor cells
by deoxycholate [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: FT. 151/200 / 1993
CL3:Serum cross-reactive thymosin al levels in rats during induction of mammary carcinoma
with 7,12-dimethylbenz[a]anthracene: short- and long-term
effects. [Cancer Carcinogenesis] Author: KT. 151/218 / 1993
CL4:In vitro effects of natural plant polyphenols on the proliferation of normal and abnormal
human lymphocytes and their secretions of interleukin-2 [Cancer Chemotherapy] Author:
TU. 151/219 / 1993
CL5: Inhibition of melanoma cell growth by amino acid alcohols. [Cancer Chemotherapy]
Author: RT 151/220 / 1993
CL6:p53 Mutations are common in pancreatic cancer and are absent in
chronic pancreatitis [Carcinogenesis] Author: AS. 151/222/ 1993
CL7:Effect of exogenous heparin on anchorage-independent growth of
fibroblasts induced by transforming cytokines [Cancer Immunohistochemistry] Author:
HY. 151/203 / 1993
CL8:c-Ha-Ras mutants with point mutations in Gln-Val-Val region have
reduced inhibitory activity toward cathepsin B [Cancer Immunohistochemistry] Author:
HD. 151/204/ 1993
CL9:Inhibition of benzoyl peroxide-induced tumor promotion and progression by copper(II)
(3,5-diisopropylsalicylate)2 [Cancer Carcinogenesis] Author: RS. 151/205 / 1993

C.R. - Cancer Research.

[SCI 1988 Rank=132 Corpus %=5.461]
CR1:Intracellular Localization of Human DNA Repair Enzyme Methylguanine-
DNA Methyltransferase by Antibodies and its Importance. [Oncology] Author: IG Vol
53/21 1992

265
 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

CR2: Monoclonal Antibodies to the Myogenic Regulatory Protein MyoD1: Epitope Mapping
and Diagnostic Utility. [Cancer Immunohistochemistry] Author: TW Vol 53/23 1992
CR3:Therapy with Unlabeled and 13lI-labeled Pan-B-Cell Monoclonal Antibodies
in Nude Mice Bearing Raji Burkitt’s Lymphoma Xenografts [Cancer
Immunohistochemistry] Author: ET Vol 53/24 1992
CR4: Inhibition of Cellular Proliferation by Peptide Analogues of Insulin-like Growth Factor
[Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: LK Vol 53/25 1992
CR5:Expression of the Endogenous 06-Methylguanine-DNA-
methyltransferase Protects Chinese Hamster Ovary Cells from Spontaneous G:C to A:T
Transitions1 [Cancer Carcinogenesis] Author: PS Vol 54/26 1993
CR6:Tumor-associated Mr 34,000 and Mr 32,000 Membrane Glycoproteins That Are Serine-
Phosphorylated Specifically in Bovine Leukemia Virus-induced Lymphosarcoma Cells’
[Cancer Carcinogenesis] Author:PR Vol 54/27 1993
CR7:Antitumor Effect of Interferon plus Cyclosporine A following
Chemotherapy for Disseminated Melanomal [Cancer Immunology] Author: SH Vol
54/28 1993
CR8: Tumorigenic Suppression of a Human Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma Cell Line
in the Nude Mouse Skin Graft Assay. [Cancer chemotherapy] Author: GU Vol 54/29
1993
CR9:A Retrovirus in Chinook Salmon (OncoYhynchus tshawytscha)
with Plasmacytoid Leukemia and Evidence for the Etiology of the Disease.
[Carcinogenesis] Author: AL Vol 52/17 1991
CR10: Expression and CpG Methylation of the Insulin-like Growth Factor II Gene in Human
Smooth Muscle Tumors [Carcinogenesis] Author: HT Vol 52/18 1991
CR11:Loss of Heterozygosity Involves Multiple Tumor Suppressor Genes in
Human Esophageal Cancers [Carcinogenesis] Author: YF Vol 54/19 1991
CR12:Induction of c-fos Gene Expression by Exposure to a Static Magnetic Field in HeLaS3
Cells1 [Carcinogenesis] Author: KH Vol 54/20 1991

F.A.T. - Fundamental and Applied Toxicology.

[SCI 1988 Rank= 289 Corpus %=7.3]
FAT1:2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetic Acid Influence on 2,6-Dinitrotoluene
induced Urine Genotoxicity in Fischer 344 Rats: Effect on Gastrointestinal Microflora
and Enzyme Activity [Toxicology] Author BN. Source F. App. Tox. 18/2 1992
FAT2:Three-Month Effects of MDL 19,660 on the Canine Platelet and
Erythrocyte [Toxicology] Author IY. Source F. App. Tox. 18/3 1992
FAT3:Evaluation of the Potential for Developmental Toxicity in Rats and
Mice following Inhalation Exposure to Tetrahydrofuran [Toxicology] Author GH. Source
F. App. Tox. 18/3 1992
FAT4:Topical Anesthetic-lnduced Methemoglobinemia in Sheep: A Comparison
of Benzocaine and Lidocaine1. [Toxicology] Author PK. Source F. App. Tox. 18/4 1992
FAT5: Time Course of Permeability Changes and PMN Flux in Rat Trachea following
03 Exposure [Toxicology] Author JG. Source F. App. Tox. 19/1 1993
FAT6:Control of the Nephrotoxicity of Cisplatin by Clinically Used Sulfur-
Containing Compounds [Toxicology] Author LW. Source F. App. Tox. 19/2 1993
FAT7: Developmental Toxicity of Boric Acid in Mice and Rats. [Toxicology] Author FG.
Source F. App. Tox. 19/3 1993
FAT8:Acrylamide: Dermal Exposure Produces Genetic Damage in Male Mouse Germ Cells.
[Toxicology] Author GN. Source F. App. Tox. 19/4 1993

266
 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

FAT9: Effects of Diet Type on Incidence of Spontaneous and 2-Acetylaminofluorene-

lnduced Liver and Bladder Tumors in BALB/c Mice Fed AIN-76A Diet versus NIH-
07 Diet [Toxicology] Author PO. Source F. App. Tox. 17/ 1 1991
FAT10: Risk Assesment in Immunotoxicity. Sensitivity and Predictability of Immune Tests.
[Toxicology] Author SA. Source F. App. Tox. 17/3 1991

IJ.C.- International Journal of Cancer.

[SCI 1988 Rank= 226 Corpus %= 17.556]
IJC1:Down-regulation of ri(x) subunit of camp-dependent protein kinase
induces growth inhibition of human mammary epithelial cells transformed by c-ha-ras
and c-erbb-2 proto-oncogenes [Cancer Cytogenetics] Author: TM. Source: Int J. Cancer
53/14 1992
IJC2:Phenotypic and molecular analysis of ph-chromosome-positive
acute lymphoblastic leukemia cells. [Cancer Cytogenetics] Author: . Source: Int J. Cancer
53/72 1993
IJC3: Loss of heterozygosity at the short arm of chromosome 3 in renal-cell cancer correlates
with the cytological tumour type [Cancer Cytogenetics] Author: AH et al.. Source: Int J.
Cancer 53/61 1992
IJC4:Over-expression of p53 nuclear oncoprotein in transitional-cell bladder cancer and
its prognostic value [Cancer Cytogenetics]. Author: PL. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/62 1992
IJC5:International variations in the incidence of childhood bone tumours
[Cancer Epidemiology]
Author: DP, CS, JN. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/63 1992
IJC6:Molecular and serological studies of human papillomavirus among patients with
anal epidermoid carcinoma [Cancer Epidemiology] Author: PH, SG, UL, JD. Source: Int
J. Cancer 53/64 1992
IJC7:Concordant p53 and dcc alterations and allelic losses on chromosomes 13q
and 14q associated with liver metastases of colorectal carcinoma [Cytogenetics] Author:
KO et al. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/66 1992
IJC8: Isolation and characterization of an oestrogen- responsive breast-cancer cell line, eff-3
[Cancer Cytogenetics] Author: RH et al. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/671992
IJC9:Differential regulation of gelatinase b and tissue-type plasminogen activator expression
in human Bowes melanoma cells [Cancer Histopathology] Author: HB, RZ. Source: Int J.
Cancer 53/68 1992
IJC10:Antibody-induced growth inhibition is mediated through
immunochemically and functionally distinct epitopes on the extracellular domain of the
c-erbb-2 (her-2/neu) gene product pl85 [Cancer Immunohistochemistry] Author: FX et al.
Source: Int J. Cancer 53/69 1992
IJC11: Structure-activity relationships of four anti-cancer alkylphosphocholine derivatives in
vitro and in vivo [Cancer Chemotherapy]. Author: SS et al. . Source: Int J. Cancer 53/70
1992
IJC12:Analysis of the relationship between stage of differentiation and
NK/LAK susceptibility of colon carcinoma cells. [Cancer Histopathology] Author: HB,
RZ. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/72 1993
IJC13:Combination effect of vaccination with il2 and il4 cdna transfected cells on
the induction of a therapeutic immune response against lewis lung carcinoma
cells [Cancer Cytogenetics] Author: YO, EP,KO. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/74 1993
IJC14: Comparative cytogenetic and dna flow cytometric analysis of 150 bone and soft-
tissue tumors [Cytogenetics] Author: NM, BB etc.. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/84 1993

267
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IJC15: The role of the urokinase receptor in extracellular matrix degradation by

ht29 human colon carcinoma cells [Cancer Histopathology] Author: LR, EK. Source: Int
J. Cancer 53/85 1993
IJC16: Immortalization of normal human fibroblasts by treatment with 4-nitroquinoline l-
oxide. [Cancer Cytogenetics] Author: LB, YK, MN. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/86 1993
IJC17:Expression and distribution of peripherin protein in human neuroblastoma cell
lines. [Cancer Histopathology] Author: HB, RZ. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/87 1993
IJC18:Anti-metastatic vaccination of tumor-bearing mice with il-2-gene-inserted tumor cells.
[Cancer Immunohistochemistry] Author: AP, BG,RB. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/88 1993
IJC19: Distinct p-glycoprotein expression in two subclones simultaneously selected from
a human colon carcinoma cell line by cis-diamminedichloroplatinum (ii)
[Cancer Chemotherapy] Author: LY, JT. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/89 1993
IJC20:Cellular and in vivo characterization of the mcr rat mammary tumor
model [Cancer Immunohistochemistry] Author: AG, UR. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/90
1993
IJC21:Co-amplification of c-myc/pvt-l in immortalized mouse b-lymphocytic
cell lines results in a novel pvt-l/aj-l transcript. [Cytogenetics] Author: KH, DS. Source:
Int J. Cancer 53/91 1993
IJC22:Persistence of plasmin-mediated pro-urokinase activation on the surface
of human monocytoid leukemia cells in vitro. [Cancer Histopathology] Author: HT.
Source: Int J. Cancer 53/92 1993
IJC23:Cytokeratins expressed in experimental rat bronchial carcinomas
[Cancer Histopathology]
Author: HK, AHB etc.. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/93 1993
IJC24:Activators of coagulation in cultured human lung-tumor cells [Cancer Histopathology]
Author: RS, HH. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/94 1993
IJC25:Action of a cd24-specific deglycosylated ricin-a-chain immunotoxin
in conventional and novel models of small-cell-lung-cancer xenograft.
[Cancer Immunohistochemistry] Author: UP, HPL. Source: Int J. Cancer 53/95 1993

J.C.P.T. - Journal of Chemistry: Perkin Transactions.

[SCI 1988 Rank= 290 Corpus %= 6.626]
JCPT1: Synthesis of (+)- and (-)-Methyl Shikimate from Benzene [Structural Chemistry]
Author CJ Vol 1 1993
JCPT2: A Reinvestigation of the Intramolecular Buchner Reaction of 1- Diazo-4-
phenylbutan-2-ones Leading to 2-Tetralones [Structural Chemistry] Author AC Vol 2
1993
JCPT3:Synthesis of ‘5N-Labelled Chiral Boc-Amino Acids from Triflates of
Leucine and Phenylalanine. [Structural Chemistry] Author FD Vol 3 1993
JCPT4:Studies on Pyrazines. Part 25. Lewis Acid-promoted Deoxidative Thiation
of Pyrazine N-Oxides: New Protocol for the Synthesis of 3-Substituted
Pyrazinethiols. [Structural Chemistry] Author NS Vol 4 1993
JCPT5: Use of the 1-(2-Fluorophenyl)-4-methoxypiperidin-4-yl (Fpmp) Protecting Group in
the Solid-Phase Synthesis of Oligo- and Poly-ribonucleotides. [Structural Chemistry]
Author VR Vol 4 1992
JCPT6:Reinvestigation of the Pummerer Arylation of to 2,2’,5’-
Trihydroxybiaryls. Quinones: A Selective Approach. [Structural Chemistry] Author GS
Vol 2 1992
JCPT7:Synthesis and Hydrolysis Studies of Phosphonopyruvate. [Structural Chemistry]
Author: SF Vol. 2 1991
268
 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

JCPT8:Structural Studies on Bio-active Molecules. Part 17. Crystal Structure of 9-(2’-

Phosphonylmethoxyethyl)adenine (PMEA). [Structural Chemistry]. Authors: WT, SF.
Source: author ms
JCPT9:Bioreversible Protection for the Phospho Group: Bioactivation of the Di(4-
acyloxybenzyl) and Mono(4-acyloxybenzyl) Phosphoesters of
Methylphosphonate and Phosphonoacetate1. [Structural Chemistry] Author: AM, WT,
DN, WI, SF.Vol 1 1992
JCPT10:Latent Inhibitors. Part 7. Inhibition of Dihydro-orotate Dehydrogenase
by Spirocyclopropanobarbiturates. [Structural Chemistry].. Author: WF, CS, HW 1 1990

J.G.M. - Journal of General Microbiology.

[SCI 1988 Rank= 389 Corpus %= 7.971]
JGM1: Isolation and characterization of urease from AspeYgillus niger. [Enzymology]
Author RD. JGM Vol 193/5 1992
JGM2:Functional and physiological characterization of the Tn21 cassette
for resistance genes in Tn2426 [Enzymology] Author JG. JGM Vol 193/8 1992
JGM3:Resistance to spiramycin in Streptomyces ambofaciens, the
producer organism involves at least two different mechanisms. [Enzymology] Author SJ.
JGM Vol 189/1 1989
JGM4:The induction of oxidative enzymes in Streptomyces coelicolor
upon hydrogen peroxide treatment. [Enzymology] Author PF. JGM Vol 189/2 1989
JGM5:Bacterial metabolism of 5-aminosalicylic acid: enzymic conversion to L-
malate, pyruvate and ammonia. [Enzymology] Author SK. JGM Vol 189/3 1989
JGM6:Regulation of methylthioribose kinase by methionine in
Klebsiella pneumoniae. [Enzymology].
Author ME. JGM Vol 189/4 1989
JGM7:Ionophoric action of trans-isohumulone on Lactobacillus
brevis. [Immunobacteriology]
Author BU. JGM Vol 190/2 1990
JGM8:Archetal halophins (halobacteria) from 2 salt enzymes in
klebsiella pneumoniae. [Enzymology]
Author BI. JGM Vol 190/3 1990
JGM9: Characterization of the trypsin-like enzymes of Polyphyomonas gingivalis W83 using
a radiolabelled active-site-directed inhibitor. [Enzymology] Author LD. JGM Vol 188/1
1988

J.M.C. - Journal of Medicincal Chemistry.

[SCI 1988 Rank= 384 Corpus %= 0.86]
JMC: Structural Studies on Tazobactam. [Structural Chemistry]
Author PL. J MedChem 34 / 1991

J.N.C.I. - Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

[SCI 1988 Rank= Not ranked. Corpus %= 0.39]
JNCI: Lipolytic Factors Associated With Murine and Human Cancer Cachexia [Cancer
Histopathology]
Author HD, MT. JNat Can Inst 82/24 1990

J.O.A.C.S. - Journal of the American Chemical Society.

[SCI 1988 Rank= 312. Corpus %= 6.179]

269
 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

JOACS1:Time Evolution of the Intermediates Formed in the Reaction of

Oxygen with Mixed-Valence Cytochrome c Oxidase. [Sructural Chemistry] Author: WH
JOrgS. Vol. 112/26 1991
JOACS2:Dynamic Properties and Electrostatic Potential Surface of Neutral
DNA Heteropolymers. [Organic Chemistry] Author: SN JOrgS. Vol. 112/25 1991
JOACS3:Bonding between C2 and N2: A Localization- Induced (a) Bond.
[Organic Chemistry]
Author: KL JOrgS. Vol. 112/27 1991
JOACS4:Normal-Mode Characteristics of Chlorophyll Models. Vibrational
Analysis of Metallooctaethylchlorins and Their Selectively Deuterated Analogues.
[Organic Chemistry]
Author: AD JOrgS. Vol. 112/16 1991
JOACS5:The Effect of §-Fluorine Substituents on the Rate and Equilibrium Constants
for the Reactions of ~-Substituted 4-Methoxybenzyl Carbocations and on the
Reactivity of a Simple Quinone Methide. [Organic Chemistry] Author: MK JOrgS. Vol.
113/9 1992
JOACS6:Concurrent Stepwise and Concerted Substitution Reactions of 4-
Methoxybenzyl Derivatives and the Lifetime of the 4-Methoxybenzyl Carbocation.
[Structural Chemistry] Author: NE JOrgS. Vol. 113/6 1992
JOACS7: Enzyme and mediated enantiface differentiation.[Organic Chemistry] Author: SC
JOrgS. Vol. 113/7 1992
JOACS8:Photochemical Ligand Loss as a Basis for Imaging and
Microstructure Formation in a Thin Polymeric Film. [Structural Chemistry] Author: VN
JOrgS. Vol. 113/8 1992
JOACS9:IHNMR Resonance Assignment of the Active Site Residues
of Paramagnetic Proteins by 2D Bond Correlation Spectroscopy: Metcyanomyoglobin.
[Organic Chemistry] Author: BN JOrgS. Vol. 113/10 1992
JOACS10 How Far Can a Carbanion Delocalize? 13C NMR Studies on
Soliton Model Compounds. [Organic Chemistry] Author: WA JOrgS. Vol. 113/11 1992
JOACS11:Calculation of Structures and Bond Dissociation Energies of Radical Cations: The
Importance of Through-Bond Delocalization in Bibenzylic Systems.[Organic Chemistry]
Author: SG JOrgS. Vol. 114/1 1993

270
 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

J.O.C. - Journal of Organic Chemistry.

[SCI 1988 Rank= 382 Corpus %= 5.940]

JOC1:Oxidation of Natural Targets by Dioxiranes. 2.1 Direct Hydroxylation at

the Side- Chain C-25 of Cholestane Derivative and of Vitamin D3 Windaus-
Grundmann Ketone. [Organic Chemistry] Author LE: JOC 57/6 1992
JOC2:Synthesis of 3-Arylpyrroles and 3-Pyrrolylacetylenes by Palladium-
Catalyzed Coupling Reactions [Organic Chemistry] Author JH: JOC 57/5 1992
JOC3:A Simple Asymmetric Synthesis of 2-Substituted Pyrrolidines and 5-
Substituted Pyrrolidinones [Organic Chemistry] Author MR: JOC 57/4 1992
JOC4:Stereo-and Regioselective Synthesis Of Chiral Diamines and Triamine from
Pseudoephedrine and Ephedrine [Organic Chemistry] Author PD: JOC 57/1 1992
JOC5: New Electron Acceptors: Synthesis, Electrochemistry, and Radical Anions of N,7,7-
Tricyanoquinomethanimines and X-ray Crystal Structures of the
Trimethyl and Tetramethyl Derivatives [Organic Chemistry] Author IS: JOC 57/2 1992
JOC6:Stereocontrolled Syntheses of Substituted Unsaturated Lactam from 3-
Alkenamide [Organic Chemistry] Author ST: JOC 57/3 1992
JOC7: Importance of the Folded Orientation of Two Enoate Moietiey [Organic Chemistry]
Author: FN JOC 58/1 1993

J.P.P.- Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology.

[SCI 1988 Rank= 465 Corpus %= 3.195]

JPP1:Hydrolysis of Partially Saturated Egg Phosphatidylcholine in

Aqueous Liposome Dispersions and the Effect of Cholesterol Incorporation on
Hydrolysis Kinetics [Pharmacology] Author RY, SJ, HS: JPP 46/6 1990
JPP2:Hydrolysis and Stability of Acetylsalicylic Acid in Stearylamine-containing Liposomes
[Pharmacology] Author: DI, SA, IS JPP 46/5 1990
JPP3: In-vitro Bioadhesion of a Buccal, Miconazole Slow-release Tablet [Pharmacology]
Author RT, SG: JPP 46/4 1990

P.A.H. - Pharmaceutica Acta Helvetica.

[SCI 1988 Rank= 516. Corpus %= 0.726]

PAH1:Thin Layer Chromatography in Pharmaceutical Quality Control. Assay of Inosiplex in

different pharmaceutical forms. [Pharmacology] Author ED: Pharm A Helv 67/342-373
PAH2:The Stability of Famotidine Hydrochloride Solutions at Different pH
Values. [Pharmacology]
Author LK: Pharm A Helv 67/321-352

271
 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

T.L. - Tetrahedron Letters.

[SCI 1988 Rank= 476. Corpus %=0.446]

TL: Synthesis of Antiviral Nucleosides from Crotonaldehyde. Part 3.1,2 Total Synthesis
of Didehydrodideoxythymidine (d4T) [Organic Chemistry] Author: JE, JG. Tetr Let Vol.
33/27 1992
T.P.S. - Trends in Pharmaceutical Sciences.
[SCI 1988 Rank= 94. Corpus %=0.231]

TPS: Newly identified factors that alter host metabolism in cancer cachexia [Cancer
Histopathology]
Author: MT. Source: JNCI Vol. 82/ 24

272
 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

VIII. Appendix C: Salient Word Lists

1. Salient Words in Titles2

Titles PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability

1 CHARACTERIZATI 8 (0.4%) 44 236.0

2 HUMAN 25 (1.2%) 784 (0.2%) 126.6
3 SYNTHESIS 12 (0.6%) 204 119.9
4 LNDUCED [sic] 2 3 101.4
5 KLEBSIELLA 2 4 84.0
6 REINVESTIGATIO 2 4 84.0
7 METHOXYBENZYL 3 (0.1%) 14 80.3
8 CANCER 16 (0.7%) 522 (0.1%) 74.8
9 METHYLTRANSFER 2 5 71.6
10 EDATREXATE 2 5 71.6
11 CARCINOMA 9 (0.4%) 205 62.2
12 OF 166 (7.6%) 21309 (4.3%) 59.3 0.000
13 BIOREVERSIBLE 2 7 55.0
14 13LI 2 8 49.2
15 B6C3F1 3 (0.1%) 24 48.8
16 SUBSTITUTES 5 (0.2%) 77 48.6
17 METHYLGUANINE 2 10 40.5
18 EXPRESSION 13 (0.6%) 582 (0.1%) 38.4
19 EPIDERMOID 2 12 34.3
20 PNEUMONIAE 2 13 31.8
21 REGULATION 4 (0.2%) 72 30.7
22 N 17 (0.8%) 1076 (0.2%) 29.4
23 LEUKEMIA 4 (0.2%) 75 29.3
24 FLUX 1 1 28.0
25 L121 1 1 28.0
26 VLVO [sic] 1 1 28.0
27 POLYPHYOMONAS 1 1 28.0
28 E1 1 1 28.0
29 AMINOSALICYLIC 1 1 28.0
30 SERINEPHOSPHOR 1 1 28.0
31 LIDOCAINE1 1 1 28.0
32 ONCOYHYNCHUS 1 1 28.0

2
Some items were mis-scanned in the original corpus. I have marked them sic

273
 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

33 INEDSINE 1 1 28.0
34 MELANOMAL 1 1 28.0
35 MOIETIEY 1 1 28.0
36 SUBLCONES [sic] 1 1 28.0
37 ASSAY1 1 1 28.0
38 LYMPHOBLASTIC 1 1 28.0
39 AANALYSIS [sic] 1 1 28.0
40 PYRENEINDUCED 1 1 28.0
41 ARCHETAL 1 1 28.0
42 IMPORTANCEL 1 1 28.0
43 ANTLTUMOUR [sic] 1 1 28.0
44 ASPEYGILLUS 1 1 28.0
45 DISEASE1 1 1 28.0
46 DELOCALIZE 1 1 28.0
47 PREDICTABILITY 1 1 28.0
48 TRIAMINE 1 1 28.0
49 PREDICTABILITY 1 1 28.0
50 TRIAMINE 1 1 28.0

Salient Grammatical Words in Titles

Titles PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability

12 OF 166 (7.6%) 21309 (4.3%) 59.3 0.000

60 FOR 110 (5.0%) 5224 (1.0%) 26.6 0.000
67 ON 24 (1.1%) 2182 (0.4%) 20.5 0.000
70 AND 99 (4.6%) 14610 (2.9%) 19.7 0.000
134 IN 91 (4.2%) 14349 (2.9%) 12.9 0.000

274
 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

2. Salient Words in Abstracts

Abstracts PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability
1 ABSTRACT 32 (0.1%) 32 234.6
2 SUMMARY 39 (0.1%) 63 203.3 0.000
3 DOXORUBICIN 26 97 54.7 0.000
4 5FU 14 45 34.1
5 MYOD1 9 19 33.2
6 DOXO 16 59 33.0
7 KG 43 (0.1%) 303 30.4 0.000
8 SUGGEST 30 (0.1%) 177 30.3 0.000
9 HN9 5 5 29.9
10 H691VDS 5 6 26.4
11 HETEROZYGOSITY 13 50 24.8
12 ESTERS 12 44 24.2
13 MAMMARY 26 161 23.7 0.000
14 ACTIVE 33 (0.1%) 231 23.4 0.000
15 DOSES 29 193 22.8 0.000
16 STUDIED 26 164 22.8 0.000
17 RESISTANEE [sic] 4 4 22.4
18 SPIRAMYEIN 4 4 22.4
19 TUMOR 114 (0.4%) 1235 (0.2%) 21.8 0.000
20 INHIBITED 21 121 21.7 0.000
21 IOA 6 12 21.7
22 EXPRESSION 63 (0.2%) 582 (0.1%) 21.6 0.000
23 PATIENTS 63 (0.2%) 584 (0.1%) 21.3 0.000
24 CORRELATED 13 56 21.0
25 MHB 16 80 20.8 0.000
26 ACYLOXYBENZYL 9 29 20.7
27 ANTHRACENE 13 57 20.5
28 INDUCED 57 (0.2%) 521 (0.1%) 20.1 0.000
29 OA 4 5 19.2
30 NDENT 5 9 19.0
31 BUT 67 (0.2%) 663 (0.1%) 18.1 0.000
32 IMMORTALIZED 13 62 17.9
33 SHOWED 43 (0.1%) 375 17.4 0.000
34 INCREASED 43 (0.1%) 376 17.2 0.000
35 INTERVAL 12 56 16.9
36 PDL 4 6 16.7
37 GROWTH 69 (0.2%) 707 (0.1%) 16.4 0.000
38 DECREASED 23 161 15.9 0.000
39 CANCER 54 (0.2%) 522 (0.1%) 15.7 0.000
40 CONTRACTIONS 5 11 15.7

275
 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

41 AZIDE 10 43 15.7
42 HAEMORRHAGE 8 29 15.5
43 THESE 119 (0.4%) 1399 (0.3%) 15.3 0.000
44 MANAGEMENT 17 104 15.3 0.000
45 ETHOXY 3 3 15.0
46 PROFICIENT 3 3 15.0
47 NONNAL 3 3 15.0
48 BENZOCAINE 12 61 14.7
49 PAA 4 7 14.6
50 TUMORS 82 (0.3%) 903 (0.2%) 14.4 0.000

Salient Grammatical Words in Abstracts

Abstracts PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability

31 BUT 67 (0.2%) 663 (0.1%) 18.1 0.000

43 THESE 119 (0.4%) 1399 (0.3%) 15.3 0.000
79 OF 1367 (4.7%) 21309 (4.3%) 11.8 0.001
198 THERE 40 (0.1%) 444 6.5 0.011
203 IN 912 (3.1%) 14349 (2.9%) 6.3 0.012
267 WAS 365 (1.3%) 6271 (1.2%) 5.0 0.020
299 THAT 227 (0.8%) 3357 (0.7%) 4.5 0.034
329 DID 34 (0.1%) 395 4.3 0.037
334 WHO 14 129 4.2 0.040
378 BOTH 55 (0.2%) 713 (0.1%) 3.7 0.055

276
 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

3. Salient Words in Introduction Sections

Introductions PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability
1 ET 692 (1.2%) 1987 (0.4%) 652.5 0.000
2 AL 670 (1.1%) 1933 (0.4%) 626.3 0.000
3 BEEN 346 (0.6%) 966 (0.2%) 341.1 0.000
4 HAS 283 (0.5%) 741 (0.1%) 310.3 0.000
5 HAVE 359 (0.6%) 1127 (0.2%) 285.4 0.000
6 INTRODUCTION 83 (0.1%) 97 234.8 0.000
7 IS 643 (1.1%) 3169 (0.6%) 156.3 0.000
8 RECENTLY 52 102 84.3 0.000
9 STUDIES 135 (0.2%) 494 76.6 0.000
10 CANCER 140 (0.2%) 522 (0.1%) 76.0 0.000
11 SUCH 113 (0.2%) 388 73.7 0.000
12 GENES 82 (0.1%) 242 71.9 0.000
13 EFFECTS 112 (0.2%) 414 61.8 0.000
14 VARIETY 37 72 59.9 0.000
15 CAN 120 (0.2%) 468 58.1 0.000
16 ROLE 56 152 56.4 0.000
17 REPORT 37 79 53.0 0.000
18 IT 207 (0.3%) 1006 (0.2%) 52.2 0.000
19 WE 200 (0.3%) 972 (0.2%) 50.4 0.000
20 SUPPRESSOR 39 92 48.5 0.000
21 HUMAN 167 (0.3%) 784 (0.2%) 47.4 0.000
22 IMPORTANT 55 170 43.7 0.000
23 MANY 50 150 41.9 0.000
24 SYNTHESIS 61 (0.1%) 204 41.5 0.000
25 OF 2874 (4.8%) 21309 (4.3%) 41.4 0.000
26 CHIRAL 26 51 41.0 0.000
27 ARE 332 (0.6%) 1920 (0.4%) 39.7 0.000
28 BE 317 (0.5%) 1825 (0.4%) 38.8 0.000
29 SEVERAL 75 (0.1%) 284 38.7 0.000
30 REPORTED 95 (0.2%) 395 38.6 0.000
31 CLINICAL 48 151 36.7 0.000
32 TO 1233 (2.1%) 8631 (1.7%) 36.6 0.000
33 COMPOUNDS 76 (0.1%) 296 36.6 0.000
34 MECHANISMS 45 138 36.1 0.000
35 ITS 88 (0.1%) 365 36.0 0.000
36 OFTEN 29 68 35.9 0.000
37 SYSTEMS 37 104 34.5 0.000
38 CANCERS 36 100 34.3 0.000
39 SOME 77 (0.1%) 310 34.0 0.000

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 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

40 AGENTS 45 145 32.7 0.000

41 ACYLOXYMETHYL 1 11 31.9
42 DEMONSTRATED 48 162 31.8 0.000
43 THIS 330 (0.6%) 1997 (0.4%) 30.6 0.000
44 USEFUL 26 63 30.4 0.000
45 PROPERTIES 28 73 29.3 0.000
46 GENE 115 (0.2%) 557 (0.1%) 29.0 0.000
47 ATTENTION 14 21 28.7
48 VIVO 48 171 28.2 0.000
49 MAY 130 (0.2%) 658 (0.1%) 27.9 0.000
50 INCLUDE 21 47 27.2 0.000

Salient Grammatical Words in Introduction Sections.

Introductions PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability
3 BEEN 346 (0.6%) 966 (0.2%) 341.1 0.000
4 HAS 283 (0.5%) 741 (0.1%) 310.3 0.000
5 HAVE 359 (0.6%) 1127 (0.2%) 285.4 0.000
7 IS 643 (1.1%) 3169 (0.6%) 156.3 0.000
11 SUCH 113 (0.2%) 388 73.7 0.000
15 CAN 120 (0.2%) 468 58.1 0.000
18 IT 207 (0.3%) 1006 (0.2%) 52.2 0.000
19 WE 200 (0.3%) 972 (0.2%) 50.4 0.000
25 OF 2874 (4.8%) 21309 (4.3%) 41.4 0.000
32 TO 1233 (2.1%) 8631 (1.7%) 36.6 0.000

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

4. Salient Words in Methods Sections.

Methods PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability
1 WERE 2795 (2.0%) 5162 (1.0%) 876.5 0.000
2 H 1281 (0.9%) 1961 (0.4%) 620.2 0.000
3 WAS 2877 (2.1%) 6146 (1.2%) 576.7 0.000
4 ML 850 (0.6%) 1097 (0.2%) 562.8 0.000
5 C 1303 (0.9%) 2303 (0.5%) 454.8 0.000
6 MIN 506 (0.4%) 725 (0.1%) 277.5 0.000
7 MM 401 (0.3%) 540 (0.1%) 245.9 0.000
8 MMOL 282 (0.2%) 302 245.4 0.000
9 ADDED 295 (0.2%) 340 231.6 0.000
10 M 582 (0.4%) 973 (0.2%) 231.2 0.000
11 X 597 (0.4%) 1045 (0.2%) 212.4 0.000
12 G 520 (0.4%) 878 (0.2%) 201.7 0.000
13 D 487 (0.4%) 821 (0.2%) 189.5 0.000
14 SOLUTION 304 (0.2%) 428 171.7 0.000
15 HZ 240 (0.2%) 294 171.5 0.000
16 S 620 (0.5%) 1203 (0.2%) 166.9 0.000
17 WASHED 179 (0.1%) 190 157.0 0.000
18 THEN 282 (0.2%) 420 142.9 0.000
19 BUFFER 232 (0.2%) 313 141.2 0.000
20 AT 1324 (1.0%) 3287 (0.7%) 140.3 0.000
21 PH 304 (0.2%) 483 134.8 0.000
22 USING 412 (0.3%) 752 (0.2%) 131.2 0.000
23 PBS 143 (0.1%) 153 123.8 0.000
24 INCUBATED 184 (0.1%) 237 120.9 0.000
25 FOR 1919 (1.4%) 5224 (1.0%) 120.1 0.000
26 DESCRIBED 269 (0.2%) 436 114.0 0.000
27 WATER 209 (0.2%) 305 109.9 0.000
28 PERFORMED 181 (0.1%) 250 105.3 0.000
29 SODIUM 142 (0.1%) 173 101.7 0.000
30 EACH 323 (0.2%) 595 (0.1%) 100.2 0.000
31 CONTAINING 229 (0.2%) 370 97.6 0.000
32 V 288 (0.2%) 515 (0.1%) 96.5 0.000
33 I 828 (0.6%) 2029 (0.4%) 93.1 0.000
34 USED 391 (0.3%) 790 (0.2%) 92.7 0.000
35 SIGMA 100 102 91.7 0.000
36 CH 100 106 87.2 0.000
37 COLUMN 152 (0.1%) 212 86.7 0.000
38 DRIED 102 113 83.7 0.000
39 MEDIUM 221 (0.2%) 376 83.6 0.000
40 DISSOLVED 90 92 82.1 0.000
41 TEMPERATURE 145 (0.1%) 204 81.3 0.000
42 MIXTURE 137 188 80.4 0.000
43 MHZ 92 101 76.3 0.000

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 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

44 AND 4633 (3.4%) 14610 (2.9%) 74.3 0.000

45 METHODS 162 (0.1%) 253 74.0 0.000
46 ROOM 99 117 73.9 0.000
47 CM3 81 84 72.4 0.000
48 DILUTED 79 82 70.5 0.000
49 COLLECTED 102 128 69.3 0.000
50 REMOVED 102 132 65.9 0.000

Salient Grammatical Words in Methods Sections.

Methods PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability
1 WERE 2795 (2.0%) 5162 (1.0%) 876.5 0.000
3 WAS 2877 (2.1%) 6146 (1.2%) 576.7 0.000
18 THEN 282 (0.2%) 420 142.9 0.000
20 AT 1324 (1.0%) 3287 (0.7%) 140.3 0.000
25 FOR 1919 (1.4%) 5224 (1.0%) 120.1 0.000
30 EACH 323 (0.2%) 595 (0.1%) 100.2 0.000
44 AND 4633 (3.4%) 14610 (2.9%) 74.3 0.000
82 FROM 1048 (0.8%) 2982 (0.6%) 47.2 0.000
139 AFTER 431 (0.3%) 1139 (0.2%) 32.0 0.000
260 WITH 1711 (1.2%) 5543 (1.1%) 17.8 0.000

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

5. Salient Words in Results Sections

Results PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability
1 FIGURE 470 (0.4%) 650 (0.1%) 366.3 0.000
2 FIG 496 (0.4%) 757 (0.2%) 328.1 0.000
3 TABLE 475 (0.4%) 774 (0.2%) 278.7 0.000
4 SHOWN 372 (0.3%) 731 (0.1%) 145.4 0.000
5 P 451 (0.4%) 992 (0.2%) 130.6 0.000
6 H69 126 (0.1%) 163 107.4 0.000
7 MEAN 207 (0.2%) 364 103.5 0.000
8 CELLS 1028 (0.9%) 3016 (0.6%) 95.7 0.000
9 VALUES 231 (0.2%) 453 90.3 0.000
10 TREATED 225 (0.2%) 449 84.2 0.000
11 LANE 142 (0.1%) 230 83.3 0.000
12 CONTROL 257 (0.2%) 548 (0.1%) 80.9 0.000
13 SPIRAMYCIN 98 136 74.7 0.000
14 LLC 118 184 74.1 0.000
15 SHOWS 121 (0.1%) 197 70.1 0.000
16 NO 296 (0.2%) 694 (0.1%) 70.0 0.000
17 OBSERVED 298 (0.2%) 703 (0.1%) 69.1 0.000
18 LANES 83 113 65.0 0.000
19 SIGNIFICANTLY 150 (0.1%) 291 59.9 0.000
20 KG 154 (0.1%) 303 59.4 0.000
21 D122 85 126 57.9 0.000
22 VDS 70 92 57.6 0.000
23 SIGNIFICANT 181 (0.2%) 386 56.7 0.000
24 ANIMALS 227 (0.2%) 524 (0.1%) 56.3 0.000
25 B 275 (0.2%) 683 (0.1%) 53.2 0.000
26 MYCELIUM 56 67 52.4 0.000
27 SHOWED 172 (0.1%) 375 50.5 0.000
28 IN 3906 (3.3%) 14349 (2.9%) 50.4 0.000
29 DID 176 (0.1%) 395 47.5 0.000
30 NOT 595 (0.5%) 1798 (0.4%) 46.5 0.000
31 NUB 52 65 45.6 0.000
32 DAYS 191 (0.2%) 446 45.5 0.000
33 LIVER 201 (0.2%) 479 44.8 0.000
34 VERAPAMIL 62 89 44.2 0.000
35 WEEKS 142 (0.1%) 304 43.8 0.000
36 COMPARED 162 (0.1%) 364 43.5 0.000
37 HAD 206 (0.2%) 517 (0.1%) 38.2 0.000
38 LINES 221 (0.2%) 573 (0.1%) 36.1 0.000
39 RESULTS 275 (0.2%) 755 (0.2%) 35.2 0.000
40 AJ 43 57 34.3 0.000
41 AFTER 385 (0.3%) 1139 (0.2%) 33.8 0.000
42 MRNA 103 215 33.8 0.000

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 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

43 LOH 104 218 33.8 0.000

44 MR 57 91 33.6 0.000
45 GROUPS 163 (0.1%) 397 33.6 0.000
46 TIME 219 (0.2%) 578 (0.1%) 33.3 0.000
47 LEVELS 192 (0.2%) 491 33.1 0.000
48 CODON 55 87 33.0 0.000
49 INCIDENCE 96 197 32.9 0.000
50 POSITIVE 124 (0.1%) 282 31.9 0.000

Salient Grammatical Words in Results Sections.

Results PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability
16 NO 296 (0.2%) 694 (0.1%) 70.0 0.000
28 IN 3906 (3.3%) 14349 (2.9%) 50.4 0.000
29 DID 176 (0.1%) 395 47.5 0.000
30 NOT 595 (0.5%) 1798 (0.4%) 46.5 0.000
37 HAD 206 (0.2%) 517 (0.1%) 38.2 0.000
41 AFTER 385 (0.3%) 1139 (0.2%) 33.8 0.000
72 THERE 168 (0.1%) 444 25.2 0.000
80 THE 7427 (6.2%) 29122 (5.8%) 23.4 0.000
92 WHEN 184 (0.2%) 518 (0.1%) 20.8 0.000
125 ALL 252 (0.2%) 783 (0.2%) 16.3 0.000

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 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

6. Salient Words in Discussion Sections.

Discussions PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability
1 THAT 1381 (1.2%) 3357 (0.7%) 341.8 0.000
2 BE 788 (0.7%) 1825 (0.4%) 225.6 0.000
3 MAY 383 (0.3%) 658 (0.1%) 223.2 0.000
4 IS 1167 (1.0%) 3169 (0.6%) 193.1 0.000
5 ET 789 (0.7%) 1987 (0.4%) 172.6 0.000
6 AL 762 (0.7%) 1933 (0.4%) 162.4 0.000
7 OUR 222 (0.2%) 381 129.0 0.000
8 DISCUSSION 119 (0.1%) 145 119.1 0.000
9 IN 3991 (3.5%) 14349 (2.9%) 116.0 0.000
10 MODES 131 (0.1%) 179 111.6 0.000
11 NOT 662 (0.6%) 1798 (0.4%) 108.9 0.000
12 THIS 704 (0.6%) 1997 (0.4%) 96.2 0.000
13 WE 395 (0.3%) 972 (0.2%) 92.9 0.000
14 HAVE 442 (0.4%) 1127 (0.2%) 92.1 0.000
15 STUDY 306 (0.3%) 701 (0.1%) 89.8 0.000
16 ENDOTHELIN 162 (0.1%) 303 78.6 0.000
17 IT 390 (0.3%) 1006 (0.2%) 77.8 0.000
18 MODE 91 136 66.9 0.000
19 P53 175 (0.2%) 376 61.0 0.000
20 PRESENT 189 (0.2%) 419 60.5 0.000
21 CAN 205 (0.2%) 468 60.5 0.000
22 MIGHT 110 196 58.7 0.000
23 SUGGEST 102 177 57.4 0.000
24 HOWEVER 231 (0.2%) 561 (0.1%) 56.4 0.000
25 HAS 285 (0.2%) 741 (0.1%) 55.1 0.000
26 REPORTED 176 (0.2%) 395 54.4 0.000
27 THESE 475 (0.4%) 1399 (0.3%) 54.1 0.000
28 COULD 176 (0.2%) 398 53.2 0.000
29 STRETCHING 59 78 51.9 0.000
30 FINDINGS 71 108 50.4 0.000
31 SUCH 166 (0.1%) 388 45.5 0.000
32 WHICH 468 (0.4%) 1422 (0.3%) 45.4 0.000
33 BEEN 339 (0.3%) 966 (0.2%) 45.0 0.000
34 THE 7292 (6.4%) 29122 (5.8%) 44.4 0.000
35 MORE 232 (0.2%) 612 (0.1%) 42.3 0.000
36 GENE 212 (0.2%) 557 (0.1%) 39.2 0.000
37 EXPRESSION 219 (0.2%) 582 (0.1%) 38.8 0.000
38 SUGGESTS 68 117 38.5 0.000
39 CUOEC 64 107 38.2 0.000
40 WOULD 108 232 37.3 0.000
41 DOES 67 117 36.8 0.000
42 INCREASE 144 (0.1%) 352 34.1 0.000

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 Language in Performance Series No. 22, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 270pp.

43 PROBABLY 58 101 31.9 0.000

44 SUGGESTED 59 104 31.7 0.000
45 PERMEABILITY 55 94 31.3 0.000
46 ARE 576 (0.5%) 1920 (0.4%) 31.2 0.000
47 INDICATE 77 155 31.1 0.000
48 MECHANISMS 71 138 31.1 0.000
49 TO 2261 (2.0%) 8631 (1.7%) 30.6 0.000
50 DUE 108 252 29.5 0.000

Salient Grammatical Words in Discussion Sections

Discussions PSC
RANK WORD Freq. % Freq. % Chi2 Probability
1 THAT 1381 (1.2%) 3357 (0.7%) 341.8 0.000
2 BE 788 (0.7%) 1825 (0.4%) 225.6 0.000
3 MAY 383 (0.3%) 658 (0.1%) 223.2 0.000
4 IS 1167 (1.0%) 3169 (0.6%) 193.1 0.000
7 OUR 222 (0.2%) 381 129.0 0.000
9 IN 3991 (3.5%) 14349 (2.9%) 116.0 0.000
11 NOT 662 (0.6%) 1798 (0.4%) 108.9 0.000
12 THIS 704 (0.6%) 1997 (0.4%) 96.2 0.000
13 WE 395 (0.3%) 972 (0.2%) 92.9 0.000
14 HAVE 442 (0.4%) 1127 (0.2%) 92.1 0.000

284
 Christopher Gledhill (2000). Collocations in Science Writing.

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