A Comparative Analysis of the Frequency and Type of Lexical Collocations in Iranian Local and International Journals in the Subfields of Applied Linguistics

The past few decades has seen a great body of literature devoted to investigations of recurrent word combinations in academic prose using frequency and dispersion parameters. This has resulted in analysis of corpora in different fields of study to collect comprehensive lists of academic collocations. In the same line, the current study investigated the most frequent collocations used in a corpus of 372 articles published in Iranian Local Journals (ILJs) and International Journals (IJs) using a frequency-based approach. The data were collected using collocation extract software. The results yielded five types of lexical collocations for IJs. Adj+N collocation type had the most proportion (76.28%) while N+V collocation type had the least proportion (.83%). The findings further demonstrated seven types of lexical collocations under ILJs. Similar to IJ corpus, Adj+N with proportion of 70.1% was the most frequent type while V+Adj with proportion of .34 was the least frequent one in these journals. Finally, frequencies of common lexical collocations were compared in the two corpora. According to the obtained results, the frequencies of common collocations were higher in ILJ corpus in comparison to IJ corpus which implies overuse of collocations in Iranian corpus. Theoretical as well as pedagogical implications are discussed

Keywords:

Applied Linguistics , Frequency-based Approach , International Journals , Iranian Local Journals , Lexical Collocations