Lexical verbs in academic discourse: a corpus-driven study of learner use

The main objective of this chapter is to give a detailed description of the use of lexical verbs in L2 learners' academic writing compared to both expert and novice native writing. The investigation is based on expert and learner corpora of academic writing and the method is corpus-driven rather than corpus-based, i.e. 'relies heavily on data and (largely) automatic procedures' (De Cock 2003:197) (cf. also Tognini-Bonelli 2001). The investigation attempts to tackle the following questions: Which (categories of) verbs do learners use in their EAP writing? Is the set of EAP verbs used by L2 learners different from that of both expert and novice native users? Do L2 writers use EAP verbs in their typical lexico-grammatical patterning?

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