What Should Go With This Word Here: Connecting Lexical Collocations and Rhetorical Moves in Narrative Stories

An emerging body of corpus-based genre analysis studies has examined the connection between different types of formulaic language and rhetorical moves in various genres of academic writing. The current study extends this body of research into the understudied genre of narrative stories and the understudied phraseological unit of lexical collocations. Specifically, we compiled a corpus of narrative stories written by expert writers, extracted a list of frequent collocations from the corpus, developed a rhetorical move framework for narrative stories, examined the distribution of rhetorical stages and moves in the corpus, and explored the connection between collocations and rhetorical moves in the corpus. The findings of our research culminated in an online interface for searching the corpus for collocations and exploring their use in sentences realizing different rhetorical stages and moves in context. We discuss the potential pedagogical value of our findings and the resulting online interface for promoting learner awareness of the connection between linguistic features and rhetorical functions in narrative stories in genre-based pedagogy.