Combining intuition with corpus linguistic analysis: A study of marked lexical chunks in four Chinese students’ undergraduate assignments

Abstract

In the literature on lexical chunks, a dichotomy is frequently implied between intuitionbased methods of finding language ‘formulaic’ and frequency-based means of extracting ‘n-grams’. In this paper, a case study of four Chinese students’ undergraduate assignments is described in terms of marked or atypical lexical chunks revealed through close reading and those found through keyword analysis, when compared with a reference corpus of similar writing by British undergraduates. The paper discusses the benefits of combining the two approaches, arguing that this gives clearer insights into the personal phraseological profiles of the students’ writing than either can offer alone.