A corpus-based study on frequency, collocations, and purposive function on laboratory animal review articles using words from the Outside Word List (OWL)

Abstract

The purposes of this corpus-based study were: 1) to produce a collection of the content words of General Service List (GSL), Academic Word List (AWL), and Outside Word List (OWL) used in laboratory animal research articles, 2) to identify the high-frequency content words of OWL used in laboratory animal research articles, 3) to analyze the types of grammatical and lexical collocations of the highest- frequency content words in OWL used in laboratory animal research articles, and 4) to investigate the writing patterns used to state the purposes of the study in the laboratory animal research articles. The source of corpus included 555,526 running words which were collected from 100 review articles of Institute for Laboratory Animal Research (ILAR) between 2010 and 2014. The 100 review articles were selected by stratified random sampling and sample random sampling techniques. Then only content words in the corpus were categorized into three groups: General Service List (GSL), Academic Word List (AWL), and Outside Word List (OWL) based on the new revised version of GSL and AWL (Browne, Culligan & Phillips, 2013). In the present study, two research instruments were employed to collect data. First, the VocabProfile program was used to categorize words into GSL, AWL, and OWL. In addition, AntConc (3.4.4) was used to create a laboratory animal word list. Then the concordance lines of the highest-frequency words were analyzed to find grammatical and lexical collocations and purposive function. The data were analyzed and presented by percentage, frequency, and quartile. The results of this study are as follows. 1) OWL has the highest coverage (65.87%), followed by GSL (27.4%) and AWL (6.73%). 2) The high-frequency words in OWL ranked from 1st to 3055th (1st quartile) such as zebrafish, methylation, epigenetic, cocaine, and genome. 3) Lexical collocations were mostly found such as noun + noun (55.81%), noun + verb (17.83%), adjective + noun (14.15%), and verb + noun (7%). 4) The results showed that purposive sentences were;