COLLOCATIONS IN ENGLISH PROFESSIONAL BOOKS OF HYDRAULIC ENGINEERING

Abstract

This article reports a pilot study on developing a list of specialized collocations in English professional books to serve the English-Medium Instruction at VMU and the compilation of specialized collocation dictionaries. The study collected specialized books in Hydraulic engineering to build specialized corpus. The collocation extraction started with the identification of specilised terminologies in Hydraulic engineering, then identified their collocates within a ±3 span. The extraction method combined a quantitative approach (calculating and comparing the frequency of occurrence for each terminology and collocation) and qualitative approach (analyzing syntactic structure and semantics) for every terminologies and collocation. The final result displayed 21,760 collocations (2-5 words) of high frequency from the original 3,06-million-word corpus.