Au-delà des mots : la phraséologie appliquée à l’anglais scientifique

In the wake of the General Service List and the Academic Word List, phraseological studies help to identify meaningful continuous and non-continuous multi-word units pertinent to the teaching of languages in academic settings. Within the sciences, causality is an essential theme that often requires specific lexico-grammatical structures. Grammatical metaphor, in which complex notions tend towards more stability through grammatical expression, is characteristic of this highly coded language. This paper takes a corpus linguistics approach to examining certain conjunctive adverbs syntactically linked to a verb in –ing. For this, the 8,900 publications from 137 journals of BioMed Central parsed in the Scientext English corpus were queried for the adverbs thus, thereby, and therefore. We found that each adverb was employed in verbal collocations containing distinct conjugations within corresponding rhetorical intentions. An on-line reconstruction task based on these findings was created to help learners acquire an understanding of these constructions, specifically targeting the difficulty of many learners to master verbs in –ing.