This study investigated the vocabulary features of medical abstracts from the perspective of enhancing learners’ vocabulary experiences in the disciplinary field. Our inquiry focused on the prevalence of the General Service List (GSL), the Academic Word List (AWL), the New General Service List (NGSL), and the New JACET List of 8000 Basic Words (hereafter referred to as “New JACET 8000”), as well as the most frequent lexical bundles within these texts. In a corpus of 456,641 tokens with 13,693 types, the repeated use of words and set phrases was found across multiple abstracts despite a high average type/token ratio in the individual texts. The coverages of the GSL and AWL, the NGSL, and the New JACET 8000 were about 80%. The ten highest frequency words accounted for 26% of the total word count with all ten words covered by the GSL; however, most of them were used in context-dependent sequences. The most frequently occurring lexical bundles were highly technical although individual words in the bundles were accessible. These findings may suggest the need for and provide insights into various strategies for raising learners’ awareness of the specialized lexical landscape of texts in the disciplinary field.

In principle, the simple present tense is used for performative verbs in explicit performative sentences such as I ask you, I warn you, and I dedicate; however, some scholars have pointed out that the progressive form may be used instead of the simple present tense. This paper aims to provide a both diachronic and synchronic overview of the use of the progressive form in performative verbs, mainly focusing on the extent of the inroad of the progressive into different types of performative verbs, primarily based on the Corpus of Historical American English. This study found that the use of the progressive with performative verbs is a 20th-century phenomenon; while a limited number of performative verbs have been employed in the progressive form with a moderate frequency relative to the corresponding simple present, recent decades have witnessed increased relative frequencies in more frequent performative verbs and some extension to new verbs.

The findings of this study largely align with those of De Wit et al. (2018; 2020) concerning the types of performative verbs commonly associated with the progressive form. However, it also identified several contradictory facts and extensions their studies overlooked. This paper argues that while the “extravagance” associated with the progressive form tends to be exploited with informal and colloquial performative verbs, other factors, including individual verb characteristics and additional features of the progressive form, contribute to the usage of progressive performative verbs.

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the specific characteristics of NP as it is known expressions (e.g., the TPP as it’s known) through corpus analysis and comparison with seemingly similar NP as we know it expressions (e.g., the world as we know it). While these two types of expressions have their surface commonalities, corpus findings reveal divergent distributional patterns for them. Specifically, the analysis revolves around (i) an association between the two types of expressions and particular situations (e.g., denoting disappearance), (ii) usage of as-clauses, and (iii) discourse functions. The results demonstrate that the NP as it is known expressions lack any significant associations with particular situations and the as-clauses have two important uses: naming as the main use and restricting as another less typical use. Name-as is used to name an entity whose linguistic expression is modified by the as-clause; Restrictive-as is used to restrict the scope of such an entity. Furthermore, the name-as clause tends to signal that the NP modified by the as-clause is a paraphrase of the preceding expression and this NP tends to be a primary topic in the subsequent discourse. These properties sharply contrast with those of the NP as we know it expressions. Overall, this study advances our understanding of this lesser-studied type of expressions and provides novel insights into their semantic and discourse behavior. Furthermore, it will be expected to facilitate the exploration of other similar expressions from these perspectives.