INDONESIAN JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS Vol. 11 No. 2, September 2021, pp. 427-439 Available online at: https://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/IJAL/article/view/34182 https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v11i2.34182 427 Email: priya@mec.edu.om Phraseology in two Omani undergraduate Civil Engineering genres: The N of (the) N pattern Priya Mathew Centre for Academic Writing, Middle East College, Knowledge Oasis Muscat, P.O. Box 79, PC 124, Al Rusayl, Sultanate of Oman ABSTRACT The study of phraseology with respect to continuous and discontinuous frames in academic writing has gathered increasing research attention over the past decade. Their prevalence in expert writing and the influence of discipline and genre on their frequency and type have led to studies that attempted to identify the most productive discontinuous frames. The aim of this study is to investigate the pattern the N of (the) N, a prolific pattern in expert academic writing, in two Omani corpora of undergraduate Civil Engineering genres, Case Studies (CS) and Methodology Recounts (MR). The two strands of inquiry involve 1) a comparison between the semantic noun categories of the first (N1) and second noun (N2) used in this pattern and; 2) the N1-N2 sequences in the pattern which realize specific discourse functions in these two genres. Strings belonging to this pattern were retrieved from the two corpora through the corpus interface, Sketch Engine. Findings indicate the prevalence of this frame in the two genres and genre influence on the choice of semantic noun categories. It was also found that the N1-N2 sequences in the pattern are used to realise distinct discourse functions in the two genres. This is one of the first corpus-based studies on university student writing in the Middle East and considering that English is the language of instruction and assessment in many of these countries, these findings have significant pedagogical implications. The implications are that EFL students in such lingua franca contexts can be supported by a more discipline-specific approach. Keywords: Civil engineering; corpora; Omani undergraduates; p-frames First Received: 14 May 2021 Revised: 22 June 2021 Accepted: 12 July 2021 Final Proof Received: 7 September 2021 Published: 30 September 2021 How to cite (in APA style): Mathew, P. (2021). Phraseology in two Omani undergraduate Civil Engineering genres: The N of (the) N pattern. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 427-439. https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v11i2.34182 INTRODUCTION Engineering has been one of the most sought after disciplines by students across universities in the world and it is no wonder that this discipline has attracted the attention of linguists belonging to various traditions. Engineering discourse has been examined in terms of genre structure (Artemeva & Freedman, 2008; Artemeva, 2009; Cheng, 2007; Conrad, 2014, 2017; Gardner, 2008; Kanoksilapatham, 2015, Nesi & Gardner, 2012), vocabulary (Durrant, 2014; Hsu, 2014; Mudraya, 2006; Ward, 2009), and specific linguistic devices (Gardner et al., 2018; Leedham, 2011; Leedham & Fernandez-Parra, 2017). The differences between novice writers and experts (Conrad, 2017; Hyland, 2008) as well as between students at various levels of proficiency have also been undertaken (Gardner et al., 2018; Staples et al., 2016). Some other studies have explored disciplinary and genre variation among Engineering sub-disciplines (Gilmore & Millar, 2018; Kanoksilapatham, 2015; Nekrasova- Beker, 2019; Rezoug & Vincent, 2018). Several studies have focused on frequent multi-word sequences in engineering discourse.