A corpus-based study on frequency and purpose sentences in laboratory animal review articles using words from word lists

Abstract

The current study aimed 1) to identify top 100-high frequency of content words in a corpus of laboratory animal journals, 2) to investigate an academic word list (AWL) occurring in the same corpus, and 3) to investigate the frequency of use of words and forms in the statement of research purposes which laboratory animal researchers use in review articles. In the analytical framework, three criteria of Coxhead (2000) including specialized occurrence, range, and frequency as well as the limitation of a word family were used for choosing the word lists. Moreover, the purposive patterns applied the framework of Swales and Feak (2012) and Soranastaporn (2013). The size of corpus consisted of 160 review articles during the year 2010 to 2014 from the Journal of the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research (ILAR). All articles included 840,773 running words excluding their bibliography, references, appendix, footnotes, captions, and acknowledgements.The research instruments used for analyzing the data in this study were AntConc Version 3.4.3 and The RANGE Program. Moreover, the purpose sentences were collected from all 160 review articles. Words and patterns presenting research purposes of each sentence were investigated. Moreover, the verb tenses of purpose sentences were examined. The statistical device used in the data analysis was descriptive statistics: the frequency data and percentages. The main findings exposed that 1) there were 703,296 high-frequency words (83.65%), which were composed of 365,934 function words (43.52%) and 337,362 content words (40.13%). 2) the number of academic words in the laboratory animal review article (LARA) corpus was 36,658 word tokens (4.36%). 3) This corpus contained 133 purpose sentences, which were formed into eight purpose patterns. The pattern with a personal subject was found the most. All purpose sentences were also composed of 68 content words occurring in three word lists. Moreover, each pattern was composed of four different verb tenses present simple, future simple, past;