The Discoveries concerning AS in Aerospace Corpus

摘要

With the rapid development of computer technology and corpus linguistics, employing corpora for linguistic knowledge discoveries appears to be an emerging and promising field for scientific discourse study. This investigation aims to study lexico-grammatical features of AS in a self-compiled aerospace corpus by comparing the corresponding usages in BROWN and LOB, two well-known corpora developed during the early stage of corpus linguistics. Results show that AS, with the statistically significant difference, is used more frequently in the aerospace corpus than in BROWN and LOB. At the same time, some unique fixed idioms structures and grammatical structures of AS illustrate how different and how specialized AS is used in certain scientific discourse. It is concluded that a well-balanced EST (English for Science and Technology) corpus would be better for linguistic knowledge discoveries concerning AS in scientific discourse.