A Study on the Types and Characteristics of Expressions in Korean Academic Text Expressions

This study aimed to collect a list of 2,268 academic text expressions selected from previous studies into a refined list of 491 and inductively examine their morphological-syntactic and semantic characteristics. First, in terms of morphological-syntactic characteristics, academic text expressions were classified into polywords, institutionalized expressions, phrasal constraint, and sentence builders based on linguistic level, normativity, morphological fixedness, and continuity of constituent elements, and their characteristics were examined. Next, referring to Hyland (2005), the meta-discourse functions of academic text expressions at the discourse level were analyzed by categorizing them into interactive and interactional functions. The results show that polywords, institutionalized expressions, phrasal constraints are related to interactional functions that are concerned with the structure of academic texts, while sentence builders serve both interactional functions and intersubjective functions, reflecting the author’s attitude. It was also found that there are differences in the specific functions fulfilled depending on the type of expression. Based on these characteristics, this study highlights the need to focus not only on highly fixed and continuous multi-word expressions, which have been the primary focus of previous studies, but also on non-continuous and variable expressions such as constrained phrases and sentence builders.