A Disciplinary Study of Colligation: Hard versus Soft Sciences

ABSTRACT: According to the Lexical Priming Theory (Hoey, 2005), the colligational primings of a word impinge on the genre or discipline in which it occurs. This study attempted to compare the colligations of one noun (group) based on Hoeyʹs (2005) framework across two specialized corpora of hard and soft sciences to find out whether they are realized similarly or differently in different disciplines. Toward this end, two specialized corpora of hard (chemistry and physics) and soft (psychology and sociology) sciences were developed, each including more than 5 million words. Then, one noun which was frequently used across the corpora was selected. The fifth version of the WordSmith Tools software (Scot, 2010) was used to conduct the analyses. Results revealed that in different disciplines group colligated with different grammatical structures and functions. In other words, nouns tend to occur in or avoid certain positions in different disciplines.