Profiling lexical frame use in NSF grant proposal abstracts

Abstract

Grant proposals seeking research funding represent a high-stakes written academic register for professional scholars. Unfortunately, limited research has been undertaken to inform the productive knowledge required to write quality grant proposals. The little research that exists centers on the broader rhetorical features of the proposals while ignoring their component linguistic features. Among these linguistic features are lexical frames, or discontinuous word sequences (e.g. the * of the). Lexical frames are phraseological building blocks required for constructing the broader rhetorical features of grant proposals. For this reason, investigating lexical frame use in grant proposals is helpful for further informing productive knowledge related to writing quality grant proposals.

The purpose of this study is to profile lexical frame use in National Science Foundation grant proposal abstracts, which serve as public-facing documents used to justify continued dispersal of federal research funds in the Untied States. This is done by following a frame-first approach to comprehensively analyze frequently occurring four-word lexical frames in a corpus of NSF grant proposal abstracts. Results indicate a few general characteristics connected to lexical frame use in NSF abstracts. First, many of the frames exhibit fixed variability in addition to being either unpredictable or highly unpredictable. Furthermore, there are relatively few function word frames (e.g. the * of this) when compared to content word based frames (e.g. goal * this project) and verb based frames (e.g. the * will be). Finally, the majority of frames are functionally referential while there are very few discourse organizing frames. These characteristics are attributable to the short length of the abstracts as well as the fact that the abstracts exhibit a relatively small set of rhetorical moves.