The investigation reported in this paper is a small-scale but in-depth study branching from a comparative analysis of the lexico-grammatical behaviour of verbs in general English and engineering texts (Wu 1989). In order to confirm some of the interesting lexical and syntactic features of engineering discourse observed in the previous investigation, this study further examines the associated features that characterize engineering text to see whether they co-occur frequently enough to distinguish "engineer ing English" as a recognizable "genre". The discussion also explores the implications these findings have for ESP (English for Specific Purposes) teaching, especially in the area of teaching lexis.
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