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Record W4413271780 · doi:10.14198/elua.29226

Key verbs in English Academic Discourse

2025· article· en· W4413271780 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Маріанна Ділай, Iryna Dilai

Bibliographic record

VenueELUA Estudios de Lingüística Universidad de Alicante · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicLexicography and Language Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCorpus linguisticsLinguisticsBritish National CorpusComputer scienceAmerican EnglishKey (lock)VerbArtificial intelligenceNatural language processingSimilarity (geometry)Academic writingBritish English

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The aim of this study is to investigate the distribution and semantics of the most frequently used key verbs in English academic discourse based on the data from the corresponding sections of the English language corpora, i.e., the British National Corpus (BNC), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English (Strathy), and the specialized British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE). Verbs are regarded as indispensable meaningful building blocks of academic texts contributing to the implementation of their main communicative functions (Hinkel 2004; Granger and Paquot 2009b; Frels et al. 2010). The corpus-driven methodology applied in this research is based on normalized frequencies of verbs in the English corpora, providing insights into the prevailing linguistic patterns, semantic features, and common conventions that define the language used in academic contexts. As a result of the juxtaposition of reference and study corpora, key verbs are identified in the Academic sections of the British, American and Canadian English corpora, in the Written Academic section of the BNC and in its field subsections, i.e., humanities, natural sciences, political law education, social sciences, technical engineering; in the corpus of spoken academic English in comparison to written academic English corpus and in the texts of non-native English authors with different first languages. The semantic grouping of the key verbs is performed automatically using the UCREL semantic analysis system (Archer et al. 2002). Similarity groups for the discipline sections have been determined by calculating the Jaccard similarity coefficient. The comparison of verb keyness across the corpora reveals interdiscursive similarity and provides clues about the thematic and conceptual preferences across varieties of English, academic areas, and native and non-native English authors. The obtained quantitative corpus data serve as a foundation for uncovering subtle nuances of verb use in English academic discourse. This comprehension appears beneficial not only for EAP (English for Academic Purposes) learners and educators but also for promoting scholarly communication and enhancing understanding within global academic communities.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.754
Threshold uncertainty score0.928

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.012
GPT teacher head0.272
Teacher spread0.260 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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