General Versus Academic Usage: A Corpus Study

Introduction

It is of great importance for students to acquire knowledge on language usage for academic writing. For example, previous researches show that “academic essays are expected to be clear and straightforward so you must also make sure that your words are precise and correct and that your writing is concise” (Ismail, Tupas & Cook, 2009). However, limited study was done on how words, such as ‘scale’ and ‘range’, were distributed in particular genres of writing, even though these two words are commonly used as synonym when writing. As a result, without sufficient study on their distribution, students would use the words incorrectly in different genres.

Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to understand the language application in general and academic usage by focusing on the meanings of the words ‘scale’ and ‘range’ and how they were used in different genres of writing.

Methodology

Data was used in written components of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). At present, it contains more than 560 million words in more than 200,000 texts, which came from 5 different sources, which is convenient for observing and analyzing the texts. The frequency of the words was compared using COCA-all and the use of the wordings was identified by sampling 100 concordance lines.

Results

There are 40,236 and 63,983 occurrences of ‘scale’ and ‘range’ respectively in COCA-all. It is observable that ‘scale’ and ‘range’ are much more likely occur in academic texts than non-academic texts (spoken, fiction, magazines and news), see appendix 1. Figure 1 shows some concordance lines of ‘scale’ in COCA-acad. It was often found to be used as a noun in sentences, with exceptions of line 6, 7, 21 and 22 being used as a verb. For example, ‘scale’ is usually used with prepositions in academic texts but after adjectives in newspapers. Verbs of ‘scale’, like ‘scale up’ or ‘to scale’, are commonly used in newspapers. According to the concordance lines, 82 and 74 lines were used as nouns in academic texts and newspapers respectively. Also, it is often used as a synonym of “measurement” in academic papers, but in newspapers, it could have the sense of ‘measurement’ or ‘increase’.

For “range”, it is usually used as a noun in both academic and non-academic texts. However, in figure 2, it is observable that it is mostly used in mid-sentence, that in newspaper, it is used as the last word in sentence. It could be discovered that ‘range’ is often used before preposition in academic texts and after adjectives in newspapers. Also, ‘range’ means ‘measurement’ or ‘variety’ in academic texts, but it has meaning of describing mountains and the distance in newspapers. ‘Range’ was used as ‘increase’ when it is commonly used like ‘range from … to…’ but the results of using the synonym of ‘increase’ is few.

Discussion

‘Scale’ and ‘range’ were found to be used normally as noun in sentences, and both words usually were used with preposition. Both words have a meaning of ‘measurement’ but ‘scale’ is often used as a specific measurement, whereas ‘range’ has a broader variety of measurement. Also, ‘scale’ and ‘range’ is often applied as noun to describe a measurement. So, when ‘scale’ or ‘range’ was used in mid-sentence, it was used to describe something that could be measured, but when at last of the sentence, there would usually be an adjective before the word, which could specific the item. For example,“While the average LTV for open-end funds is more likely to be in the range of 20%-30%,”“Obi has nine rebounds and eight points, and has made all four shots he has taken from close range. ”This could explain why it was frequently used as a noun than a verb.

However, the use of verb in ‘scale’ or ‘range’ is often used to demonstrate an increase of number or stats. For instance,“The differences between the CTD and the T-bond ranked last among deliverable grades would range from 0. 11 to 2. 33. ”“About half the SIF grantees reported changes in their efforts to scale up existing programs. ”The using of the both word in academic writings were much more narrowed than the general texts as they were used with more meanings in general usage.

Conclusion

The current study discovered how frequent ‘scale’ and ‘range’ is used in various genres, and how it is applied in academic writings according to the concordance lines drawn in COCA-acad. Future studies could explore more on how other words could be used in different genres.