The Usage Of “View”, “Perspective”, “Notions” In General And Academic Genres: A Corpus Report
The Usage of “View”, “Perspective”, “Notions” in General and Academic Genres: A Corpus ReportIntroductionLearning English can be a tough task for the uninitiated. Yet, even native speakers may be perplexed when it comes to certain clusters of words which are closely related in meanings, but are spelled and sounded disparately, essentially these are synonyms (Hulme, A. K. , 1999). Thus to eliminate ambiguity, the frequency under different genres and utilization in distinctive contexts of “view”, “perspective” and “notions” will be scrutinized. MethodologyCorpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was adopted in the current study to analyse the three lexical items. Currently, COCA is one of the most acknowledged corpus which carries more than 560 million words with texts across various genres, e. g. spoken, fiction, academic journals etc. To start with, the frequency of “view”, “perspective” and “notions” were examined in COCA-all and COCA-acad. Subsequently, comparison of the three chosen words in general and academic texts were made through observing the first 100 concordance lines.
Results
In COCA-all, referring to Figures 1,2,3, the occurrences of “view”, “perspective” and “notions” are 101363, 32219 and 5567 respectively. All of them appeared most frequently in academic texts with an accumulating percentage of “view” (31. 2%), followed by “perspective” (50. 2%) and “notions” (61. 7%). It is noteworthy that the word “notions” has a particularly low frequency in other discourses compared with the other two (Figure 3). From the data analysis of “view”, in terms of part of speech, it is found that “view” can be used as either nouns or verbs, but using as a noun is more preferable in academic contexts (Figure 4). With reference to the appendices, among the top 100 concordances, only 2 lines are functioning as verb whereas in general texts 15 concordances are observed. Apart from that, academically, when “view” is in a noun form, determiners like “this”, “first”, “second” or adjectives like “metaphysical”, “strange”, “misguided” are placed in the front (Figure 4).
While in general contexts, the verb “view” is collocated with the form of “to + infinitive” (Figure 5). Based on the results in Figure 6, it is noticeable that regarding collocations, the head (noun) “perspective” collocates with pre-modifiers (adjectives) like “independent”, “brief”, “interesting” as well as post-modifiers “of”, “from”, “on” to form possible noun phrases in academic subcorpus. Yet, generally it links with pre-modifiers (possessive determiners) like “your”, “his” to state whose perspective it is (Figure 7). As shown in Figure 8, in scholarly contexts, “notions” resembles the pattern as above which collocates with pre-modifiers (adjectives) to form long noun phrase. But this time “of” is the most dominant post-modifier and prepositional phrases are constituted. Unlike the general usage of “perspective”, possessive determiners seldom appear as modifiers, this feature is also inspected in general subcorpora (Figure 8,9).
Discussion
As mentioned beforehand, “notions” were found in academic journals most frequently with “perspective” and “view” coming next. It indicates that the lexical item “notions” carries the strongest academic sense among the three. This can be illustrated through the scanty usage of possessive determiners, a type of function word, that tends to abate the subjective feelings in both academic and general writings. Nonetheless, only in general subcorpora, “perspective” is usually collocated with possessive determiners to express belonging and possession. This discloses why the word appears to be less formal than the previous one. While for the last chosen word ‘view’, it can perform a double duty by serving as noun and verb interchangeably, noted that noun form is mostly adopted in academic subcorpus.
Since ‘view’ is applicable to more contents with the two parts of speech, it boggles the non-natives speakers with its flexibility. With reference to the above analysis, it is recognized that having a linguistic background plays an important role on knowing how to select the appropriate wordings in a particular genre. As our choice of words is constrained by the context in which we use the language, people can make predictions based on the given texts (Kramsch. C. , 1993). This also explains why both non-native and native speakers are confused when facing synonyms. The present research examines on how frequent ‘view’, ‘perspective’ and ‘notions’ are used in distinct discourses and comparison is made through investigating both academic and non-academic texts. Further in-depth exploration on this field can be executed in analyzing more concordance lines so as to produce a more thorough study.
