Multi-Constituent Constructs in English Discourse of Electrical Engineering

The first part of the paper introduces the scope and the framework of our investigation and surveys the current research on multi-constituent constructs. Then, we analyse the delimitation of the term multi-constituent construct in linguistic literature, summarise certain features pertinent to multi-constituent constructs, and, eventually, apply this term in the analysis of the concrete examples excerpted from electrical engineering discourse. The third part analyses and illustrates the most relevant features of multi-constituent constructs (i.e. fixed component order and recursiveness). Semantic compositionality of multi-constituent constructs is also invoked and then observed. Considering that neither semantic compositionality nor syntactic combinations can be easily implemented in cases of multi-constituent constructs, in the fourth part we introduce the distributional evidence, which seems to cover our efforts to delimit multi-constituent constructs in electrical engineering discourse. We describe the corpus and concrete corpus-based data excerpted from electrical engineering spoken and written discourse, simultaneously providing our statistical analysis. The fifth part lists the most relevant findings about the analysed multi-constituent constructs and discusses the applicability of our analysis of concrete multi-constituent constructs. Finally, we believe that our research may have important implications for future research on multi-constituent constructs in electrical engineering discourse. Our analysis may be implemented in the ESP setting by making students, future engineers, aware of different number and part of speech ratios between components of these constructs, while demystifying potentially ambiguous multi-constituent constructs, which may enhance their comprehension skills related to the written and spoken electrical engineering discourse.