Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

As Figure 5.1 illustrates, regardless of whether a sentence finishes or not, line feed codes are
automatically inserted at the end of each line. Since data in PDF files are inherently designed
in this format, a corpus concordancer may compute each line feed code as each end of
sentence (viz. a corpus concordancer regards each line feed code as each period of the
sentence, indicating significant, written, about and broad are interpreted as the last words in
each sentence in Figure 5.1 above, even though they are clearly in the middle of each
sentence). 24 This may be a trivial issue of data preparation if the aim of the study is to extract
and count each individual word in order to, for example, create a (key)word list. However,
this may well cause problems of a more serious nature with some software including the one
used in the current study, when the goal is to extract two or more word units, such as
collocations, phrases and patterns. For example, it is impossible to extract word units,
significant parts, written academic prose, about one million, and broad categories from the
context above, largely because the computer interprets the line feeds in each of the phrases as
unseen periods. (N.B. In particular, this is a problem with the software used in the current
study which cannot cope with the data as it is). Therefore, after extracting data from academic
journals, the data were adjusted by erasing each line feed and changing it into a single space,
thereby allowing valid and meaningful collocates, phrases, and patterns to be extracted.
Having described the procedures and guidelines that informed the corpus building
process, I now turn to the final composition of the two corpora themselves. My corpus of
journal articles in applied linguistics (hereafter, ALC) comprises 289 published papers from 8
leading journals in each sub-discipline. Each sub-disciplinary sub-corpus includes
approximately 330,000 words tokens, giving a total number of running words for the whole
corpus of approximately 2,667,000 words. Meanwhile, my business studies corpus (hereafter,
BC) comprises 436 published papers from 8 leading journals in each sub-discipline. Each of
these sub-corpora also contains approximately 330,000 words each, yielding a total of
2,668,679 running words for the corpus as a whole. In short, the two corpora are almost equal
in size, in word token terms, thereby enabling a direct comparison using only raw frequency
figures. (N.B. The two corpora are not equal in terms of the number of texts that they contain,
since the token size of each article is different in the two disciplines.) Table 5.1 below
summarizes the basic figures for ALC and BC. The table provides: 1) the journal name; 2)
24 I confirmed this phenomenon in the use of the corpus concordancer used in the current study.
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