Why Do the British Like to Have Doubt? A Corpus-Based Phraseological Study of the Noun “doubt”

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Published: Jan 1, 2009

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Raksangob Wijitsopon

Abstract

The noun “doubt” is ranked among the top 100 most common nouns in the British National Corpus (BNC). To find out why this word appears frequently in British English, an analysis of its phraseological patterns was conducted, using a corpus-based approach. Frequently used phrases of “doubt” were extracted automatically via the Phrases in English (PIE) database. Some phrases were selected for further detailed investigation in terms of their uses and functions in discourse. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analyses, it is concluded that the noun “doubt” is a common word in English because it tends to be used to cancel presumed uncertainty or disbelief in communication.

Article Details

Issue
No. 1 (2009): Thoughts 2009
Section
Articles

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Author Biography

Raksangob Wijitsopon

Raksangob Wijitsopon is a lecturer at Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. She received a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Lancaster University, UK. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, stylistics and discourse analysis. She is currently working on two corpus-based research projects, one of which is on phraseology in Jane Austen's novels and the other on Thai students' use of English collocations.

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