Telling the difference between economics and philosophy lectures

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Telling the difference between economics and
philosophy lectures

• Paul ThompsonDepartment of Applied Linguistics
• University of Reading

BALEAP PIM Durham 2006
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Introduction

• The BASE corpus
• Coxheads AWL and the BASE corpus
• Distinctive lexicogrammatical features of
  lectures in two disciplines
• Economics
• Philosophy
• Evaluation

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The BASE corpus

• British Academic Spoken English corpus
• 160 lectures, 40 seminars
• Transcripts, video and audio

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The Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000)

• 570 word families above the first 2000 most
  frequent headwords
• Derived from study of a 3 million word corpus of
  academic text (journal articles, textbooks)

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Questions about the AWL

• AWL was based on written academic text. Does it
  provide a good indication of the lexis of
  academic speech events?
• Are all of the headwords used in AWL worth
  covering in a course that focuses on listening
  skills more than writing and reading skills?

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Overall statistics for BASE lectures
Many of the off-list words are names, or
specialist vocabulary Top two most frequent
off-list words are yeah and okay
The first and second 1000s are based on Michael
Wests General Service List published in 1953!
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The Spoken Academic Word Lista revised list for
lectures

• Words must have range in other words, they
  should appear in all four of the domains
• AWL provides good coverage
• 230 families, divided into 8 sub-lists

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Distinctive of spoken academic discourse

• thing, word, point, question, number, fact,
  example
• nouns from the common stock (Swales 2004)
• BASE corpus list also contains sort, kind and
  lot,
• Frequent use of labelling nouns (Francis 1994)
  points to the high level of reflexivity
• Use of sort, kind, thing and lot suggest a high
  degree of use of vague language (Channell 1994)

Lectures are characterised by high use of vague
language, and of words that organise the
discourse and the events themselves.
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Economics lectures

• There are 13 lectures in Economics (or
  Agricultural Economics) category in the BASE
  lecture corpus
• They fall into both Physical Sciences and Social
  Sciences domains (85)

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Philosophy lectures

• There are 7 undergraduate lectures
• From different modules

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Key words Economics

• Predominantly nouns (the key)
• capital, choice, commodity, constraint, cost,
  curve, debt, demand, elasticity, market, profit,
  supply, trade, variable
• Verbs
• let, represent, maximize, consume
• Mathematical symbols
• lambda, x, delta
• Pronouns we, they, their

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Key words Philosophy

• Names Kant, Hume, Frege
• Adjectives moral, human, secondary, essential,
  primary
• Nouns duty, ideas, sense, action, motives,
  nature, cognitivism, perception, empiricism
• Pronouns he, his
• Verbs say, mean, does, think, resemble, explain,
  know, claim verbal, mental

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Behaviour of key words

• Method All key nouns converted to zyrg in the
  files, using Find and replace
• Concordance lines and collocation patterns of
  zyrg investigated
• 742 instances of zyrg zyrg (compound nouns)
• Tendency to appear in the X of the Y,
  particularly in the zyrg of the zyrg (54 out of
  229)
• The zyrg of the X 70 the X of the zyrg 105

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Using Sketch Engine to investigate BASE corpus

• This is by subscription access
• Sophisticated query interface
• Corpus is lemmatised and Part-of-Speech tagged
• Word List and Corpus building facilities

URL http//www.sketchengine.co.uk/
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Common patterns TheNOUNoftheNOUN
Philosophy NOUNofARTICLEADJNOUN
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Common patterns ARTICLEADJNOUNofNOUN
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Verbs

• Economics
• Infinitive forms of be and do, -ing form of
  lexical verbswant/need to be, going to be, might
  be
• Philosophy
• 3rd person present tense forms of lexical verbs,
  be and doresembles, believes, thinks, says

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Conclusions / Pedagogical Implications

• Lexis of academic discourse varies across mode,
  domain and discipline
• Investigating lexis and lexical behaviour in a
  discipline reveals nature of the discourse
• Frames that realise typical discourse relations
  within that subject, and teaching vocabulary
  within frames
• Some features are typical of discourse within
  that discipline, some of lecture discourse, some
  of lecture discourse within that discipline