Verbs in English for academic purposes : a cross-disciplinary corpus-driven study

The teaching of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has been the subject of much debate. While some scholars advocate a wide-angle approach focusing on the skills and linguistic items that are used across academic disciplines, others rather advocate a narrow-angle approach and argue that academic disciplines show too much variation in language use for a general EAP course to be worthwhile. The present doctoral dissertation aims to take this debate a step further by exploring cross-disciplinary language variation through a corpus-driven analysis of the use and phraseology of academic verbs in business, linguistics and medical research articles. By systematically comparing the uses that are found across disciplines versus those that are discipline-exclusive, this study provides a comprehensive description of the weight that the similarities and differences in language use represent. The results reveal that, as far as verbs are concerned, there is room for general EAP courses. This study demonstrates the salience of shared academic verbs as they (1) show a very wide coverage, (2) are very often used in a core academic meaning and (3) are used in frequent shared phraseological patterns.