The phraseology of intertextuality in English for professional communication

Abstract

There is increasing interest in researching phraseology and intertextuality, but they are not usually studied together. This paper explores the implications of combining the two in the learning and teaching of English for professional communication. Using data compiled at the Hong Kong-based Research Centre for Professional Communication in English, in combination with the recently developed corpus linguistics methodology of ‘congramming’ (Cheng, Greaves and Warren, 2006; Cheng, Greaves, Sinclair and Warren, 2009), this study investigates how intertextuality can be signalled in a corpus of discourse flows. A discourse flow is a series of interconnected discourses and the flows in this study were collected from a professional over a period of one week. Concgramming is the process of fully automatically identifying concgrams in a text or corpus. Concgrams are co-occurrences of words (e.g. hard and work) irrespective of any constituent variation (work hard, work very hard, work so very hard, etc.) and positional variation (i.e. work hard, hard work, etc.) that might be present. Using concgrams extracted from the discourse flow corpus, examples of frequent phraseologies associated with the signalling of intertextuality are identified and their role in the realisation of intertextuality discussed.

Keywords: concgram, constituent variation, discourse flow, intertextuality, phraseology, positional variation