A Corpus-Based Study of Phrase Frames in Marine Science Research Article Introductions
Abstract
The analysis draws on a purpose-built corpus of 500 introductions published between 2017 and 2021 in five international journals. Each introduction was annotated according to an adapted Create a Research Space (CARS) move-step framework. Five- and six-word p-frames were
then identified through corpus-based extraction, examined individually in their original contexts, and evaluated by doctoral students in marine
science. This procedure produced a final inventory of 80 five-word and 19 six-word p-frames. Verb-based and other-content-word patterns
together accounted for 85.86% of the inventory, with verb-based structures particularly prominent among the six-word frames. Their rhetorical distribution was uneven: most tokens occurred in Move 1, Establishing a research territory, and Move 3, Presenting the present work.
Functional classification further showed that 54.55% of the frames were non-specialized, 38.38% were semi-specialized, and only 7.07% were
specialized. These findings clarify how recurrent phraseological patterns participate in the organization of marine science introductions and
provide an empirically grounded resource for discipline-specific academic writing instruction.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.70711/neet.v4i9.10047
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