A Corpus-based study on collocations of
keywords in English business articles about the
European debt crisis Đào Thị Ngọc Nguyên Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ
Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: English Linguistics; Mã số: 60 22 15
Người hướng dẫn: Ph.D. Phạm Thị Thanh Thùy
Năm bảo vệ: 2012 Abstract. One of the most problematic areas when vocabulary is dealt with is
collocation. It is often seen as arbitrary and overwhelming, a seemingly insurmountable
obstacle to the attainment of native like fluency. This piece of work presents a study on
collocations of keywords within a 20,000-word corpus of various English business
articles about the European debt crisis 2011. The aim of the present study is to find out
high-frequency words used within the corpus, and above all, to examine collocation
patterns of keywords that distinguish the business genre of the selected texts.
Concordance Program 3.3 is the main methods employed throughout the study for the
data collection and analysis. The major findings of the research are a good number of
striking collocation patterns some of the most recurrent keywords possess. The major
findings drawn from the research is the basis for the recommendation of pedagogical
implications and suggestions for raising students' consciousness of the English
collocation acquisition.

Keywords. Ngôn ngữ; Tiếng Anh; Từ vựng

Content

computers now makes it possible to quickly compose lists of frequency for lexical items in a
large corpus. At the same time, there have been a large number of different software programs
installed for keywords and collocations extract from corpus data. Such software packages have
made easier access to the investigation into typical lexical items and their collocations of any
particular text genres.
With the writer’s personal interest in collocations as a researcher and observations of students’
tough experience in dealing with collocations in business discourse as a tutor of business
learners, this thesis provides a comprehensive research on collocations of keywords in a variety
of business articles written about a currently hot topic for business learners, the European debt
crisis. The thesis, therefore, is carried out in the hope that it may be of some help to business
learners of English as well as those who find themselves interested in English semantics and
collocation-related issues.
I.2. Aims of the study
The aim of this research is to conduct a close investigation into collocations of keywords from a
corpus of a certain number of business articles written about the European debt crisis. To be
specific, it identifies words with high frequency of occurrence within the chosen corpus and
examines their collocations. The research, therefore, is carried out to answer the following
research questions:
 What are the top high-frequency words in the corpus of written articles about the European
debt crisis?
 What are significant patterns and features of collocations of such keywords?
I.3.Scope of the study
This study is about to discuss keywords and their collocations in 15 written articles about the
European debt crisis. The designed corpus of over 20,000 words is taken from online business
articles from websites of high reputation such as The Washington Post, Money CNN,
….Keywords chosen for analysis of significant patterns of collocation within the study are those
which can distinguish the business genre of the selected articles.
I.4. Structure of the thesis
The study is organized as follows:
 Chapter I-Introduction- is firstly introduced, briefly stating the rationale, aims, scope and

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