ABSTRACT
Professional discourse is generally defined as the language, written, spoken, or visual, used by professionals with specialist training to achieve a variety of functions in the professional workplace. The engineering industry can be used as an example of a network of professional discourse communities to better understand such variation. This industry has been one of the key industries in Hong Kong contributing to the growth of Hong Kong’s economy and other sectors as well as creating employment opportunities. This chapter explores the use of phrasal verbs in engineering discourse using a corpus of engineering English. Engineering always requires rigorous measurements and judgements in terms of details and processes that need to be carried out accurately and safely. Qualitative analyses were carried out to investigate further the actual use and meanings of the most frequent phrasal verbs in the engineering discourse using Sinclair’s model of lexical description.
