1. Markers of orality in lexical verb choice in a corpus of student academic writing
Writing Research Across Borders III
Paris 2014
Sandra Gollin-Kies, PhD
Benedictine University, Lisle, Illinois. USA.

2. Why verbs?
The verb (or verb phrase) is central to the meaning and structure of the clause (Halliday 1985).
Little previous corpus-based research on the effect of verb choices on the academic writing style of native, or near-native speaker, students (But see Partridge, 2011).

3. Lexical verbs
Lexical specificity in verbs has been overlooked in corpus research.
In academic writing, lexical verbs are less frequent than nouns.
In conversation, lexical verbs carry a greater burden of meaning, and are almost as frequent as nouns.
Therefore, the kind and relative frequency of lexical verbs used in student writing may suggest a degree of orality.

4. My Research Questions Have students’ verb choices changed?
Do students’ lexical verb choices indicate lesser or greater orality than the reference corpora?
Reference corpora:
Biber et. al. (2004). (Academic spoken and written texts, but no student writing).
COCA Academic (Academic journal articles).

5. Sub-sets of the FYC corpus from and analyzed using Wordsmith Tools 6 (Scott, 2012) for markers of orality with a focus on verb choice.
Findings compared against Biber et al’s T2K-SWAL corpus wordlists and the academic and spoken genre sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English COCA (100 million running words).

6. Which aspects of verbs are most interesting to interrogate?
mental verbs
common vocabulary (verbs only)
phrasal verbs

7. Corpus Materials and Methods
The corpus: student research essays on George Orwell’s “1984.”
Sub-corpus 1: (449,706 running words)
Sub-corpus 2: (363,157 running words)

8. Words used in academic registers T2K-SWAL Corpus (Biber et al, 2004).
Speech-skewed common words
More than 200 /million; /million
Writing skewed common words
Evenly distributed common words
Less common words
Words not found

9. Student writing: random samples
Today’s people love their appliances, remote controls, and luxury cars. I know I do. They make our lives so much easier, and leave us more time to do other things; like wash our cars, and clean our appliances. Are things easier? I know the computer saves me time when writing papers for school; leaving me more time to play games on it. There is no question we love our inventions.
(98-99).
SP1,SP2. ED1, ED2. W1,W2 Rare; V.rare

10. George Orwell’s book entitled 1984 describes a future society where an authoritative figure commonly named as Big Brother and his government manipulates a society. This society is constantly monitored by what Orwell describes as a “telescreen”. In this piece of equipment is capable of monitoring all actions performed by the community, as well as, informs the citizens of any fact or event related to Big Brother, the government, etc. The community is always under attack by print and video media to honor and obey Big Brother.(98-99).
SP1,SP2. ED1, ED2. W1,W2 Rare, V. rare

11. SP1,SP2. ED1, ED2. W1,W2 Rare vb. V. rare vb. Vb. not found
As we traverse though this life, many of us are secluded to a profound sense of boredom, and equally so, an everlasting quest to quench our thirst for entertainment. Though this quest, in modern times, we explore many different forms of media and various genres of such entertainment, we will almost inevitably come across the idea of utopian and dystopian science fiction. Utopia being a place of perfection, where all is well, and not even such simplistic things such as boredom itself has wrought mankind any form of illness, where naturally anti-utopian and dystopian worlds are constructed on the other side of the spectrum, where everything is in chaos, governments rule over citizens with an iron fist, people no longer feel emotion, knowledge is forebode, or the planet itself has been deteriorated and devoid of human interaction. ( )
SP1,SP2. ED1, ED2. W1,W2 Rare vb. V. rare vb. Vb. not found

12. Unlike the real dictators Hitler and Stalin, Big Brother did not really exist and never existed. It was only a symbol of English Socialism (Ingsoc) and the Party that controlled all aspects of life in Oceania through totalitarian, police state methods. After all, a dictator with a physical body would eventually become ill, decline with age and die, but Big Brother will live forever as the image of a Party that intends to remain in power forever. Its members will die off, even at the privileged Inner Party levels, but that matters no more than cutting off dead fingernails. As a collective organization, the only goal of the Party was to retain power, like a jackboot stomping on a face forever, while keeping the masses of proles sedated, subdued and existing at a minimal level. ( )
SP1,SP2. ED1, ED2. W1,W2 Rare vb. V. rare vb. Vb. not found

13. Frequencies for verbs in FYC corpora
Speech-skewed common verbs
More than 200/million; /million
No significant differences & 12-13
Overall frequencies of all lex. vbs in this class well below 0.2% or 200/million.
Writing skewed common words
More than 200 /million. None of the verbs appear at this frequency in either subcorpus.
20-200/million. Out of more than 200 verbs in this category only 28 appear in the corpus. Only 19 appeared in
Evenly distributed common words
At more than 200 /million Only one lexical verb: use. ; /million
Less common words
More than 200 /million; /million

14. Taxonomies
Bill went to the station
Bill drove, walked, cycled
Bill walked to the station.
Bill staggered, sauntered, hobbled.
Orwell says that …
Claims, explains, points out, denies

17. Look for troponyms of the main common verbs in the corpus.
Especially mental and verbal processes
e.g think
believe
understand
what about verbs like depend, require etc. Can we trace them back to more basic forms in the corpus and build some tree diagrams to show how students are using more specific language that is typical of literate discourse?

18. Findings
In this sample of college writing, after the 12 most common lexical verbs in the language, the next 20 most frequent verbs students used were from the spoken corpus rather than the academic corpus.
The most frequent verb in the next 20 most frequent from the academic list is use. This is also consistent in the student data.
Students rely on general purpose verbs like believe and understand that are also among the most frequent in conversation, rather than the most common verbs from the COCA academic list (e.g. provide, include, consider, determine).
There is less lexical variety in verb choices, and more focus on general “troponymic” verbs (Fellbaum & Miller, 1990) than in the COCA academic corpus.
Verb choices and frequencies in this sample of student writing overall share more in common with the spoken texts than the academic ones in COCA.
Overall, there is no strong evidence of a shift towards greater orality in lexical verb choice over the period under investigation; if anything, the students of the 21st century appear to be making slightly more “academic” choices than their predecessors.

19. Discussion
Our data should most closely match humanities (e.g. literature, history, sociology).
But first yr. comp is not so discipline specific.
Students may still be under the influence of school genres.
Influence of classroom genres like the lecture and textbook may be stronger than professional academic writing.

20. Comparison of FYC and Biber’s data
Feature
Biber 1998
Academic prose
Face-to-face conversation
FYC ( )
Frequency/1,000 words
Noun
188
137.4
267 (265)
Adjective attrib.
76.9
40.8
3.7(4) (Comp. and super)
Preposition
139.5
85.0
107 (111)
Conjunction
3.0
0.3
32 (33)
Verb (past)
21.9
37.4
27.5 (25)
Verb (pres)
63.7
128.4
49.1 (49.7)
Pronoun (pers.)
5.8
39.3
(45)
Adverb
51.8
86.0
40 (41)

21. Grammatical verbs: be, have, do, modals. Lexical verbs:
Difficulty of separating lexical verbs from nouns that look the same. eg. command and command.
Find all verbs
Past tense
Present tense
Passive
Passive without agent
Present participle
Past participle
Most common verbs in both speech and writing
Most common verbs in COCA spoken corpus
Most common verbs in COCA ac corpus (look for humanities subset).
Latin-based verbs.
Phrasal verbs substituting for Latin-based or single word verbs.

22. References
Biber, D. (1988) Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge NY: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, D., Johannsen, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, England: Pearson Education.
Biber, D. (2006) University Language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. John Benjamins.
Biber, D., Conrad, S.M., Reppen, R., Byrd, R.P. , Helt, P., Clark, V., Cortes, V. , Csomay, E., Urzua, A. (2004). Representing Language Use in the University: Analysis of the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus. TOEFL Monograph Series. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
Fellbaum, C., & Miller, G. A. (1990). Folk psychology or semantic entailment? Comment on Rips and Conrad (1989). Psychological Review, X, 97(4),
Freeman Y.S. & Freeman, D. (2009) Academic Language for English language learners and struggling readers. How to help students succeed across content areas. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold.
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Routledge.
Partridge, M. (2011). A comparison of lexical specificity in the communication verbs of L1 English and TE student writing. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 29(2),
Scott, M. (2012). Wordsmith Tools version 6. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.