Developing a Word Combination List of Words Following a Hyphen and Their Subsequent Nouns in Experimental Medical Papers

Abstract

This corpus-based study aims to develop a discipline-specific word combination list, centering on the words appearing immediately after a single hyphen and their subsequent nouns in experimental medical research articles (EMRAs). We compiled a corpus of 300 EMRAs published in 2014, including 1,526,927 tokens in total. Using CasualConc, we extracted the top 200 two-word and 200 three-word clusters following a single hyphen. After excluding instances where the noun was not the head noun or was a proper noun, and multi-hyphen structures, 87 clusters remained. These clusters were validated using the Life Science Dictionary (https://lsd-project.jp/). The final list categorizes these clusters into five patterns based on the part of speech following the hyphen: adjective, ed-participle, ing-participle, noun, and others. From an English for Specific Purposes perspective, this word combination list could serve as a foundational resource for developing course materials, enabling students and researchers to effectively utilize these concise and information-dense expressions.