期刊名称：Asian Journal of English Language Studies (AJELS)
电子版ISSN：2619-7219
出版年度：2017
卷号：5
页码：33-48
语种：English
出版社：Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Letters, University of Santo Tomas
摘要：This research made an initial exploration on the English N-grams commonly used by college students in their ESL writing classes. Previous studies found out that there are several types of N-grams; however, this research zeroed in on three- and four-word N-grams only as these are the most researched types and have been used in many related studies. Moreover, the functional classification of each of the identified three- and four-word N-grams was identified through the use of the taxonomy forwarded by Biber et al. (2004). The Antconc 3.2.4w retrieved a total of 31 English N-grams from the academic computer corpus that contains 100,000 running words. The findings reveal that referential N-grams are widespread, whereas both stance and referential N-grams record a minimal rate of occurrence. Several reasons in respect of the underuse of both stance and discourse N-grams were discussed; however, all of them require further analysis before any conclusion can be made.
