What Should Go With This Word Here: Connecting Lexical Collocations and Rhetorical Moves in Narrative Stories.

This article focuses on a corpus-based study investigating the relationship between lexical collocations—frequently co-occurring pairs of content words—and rhetorical moves in the genre of narrative stories. Using a corpus of 678 expert-written narrative stories from Reader's Digest, the researchers identified 219 pedagogically relevant lexical collocations and developed a rhetorical move framework comprising three stages (Orientation, Incident, Conclusion) and eight moves that characterize narrative structure. Correspondence analysis revealed distinct associations between specific collocations and rhetorical moves, highlighting three main communicative functions of collocations in narratives: introducing situational information, advancing the storyline, and expressing attitudes. The study's findings inform genre-based pedagogy by providing an online searchable interface that supports learners' awareness of how linguistic features align with rhetorical functions in narrative writing.