International Journal of Education and Social Science (IJESS)

Accountant plays a crucial role in accounting practices. This paper sets out to investigate the collocation of accountant by examining a 560-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Building on the top 100 collocation list of accountant and dividing them into 5 categories, the result shows that: 1) in the category of Words Describing Accountant, chartered accountant (CA) and certified public accountant (CPA) are found to be two common certificates of accountants. Expressions like time-jump and former accountant reflect the job status of accountant, dull and balding accountant indicate the stereotype towards accountant to some extent; 2) in the category of Accounting Branches, tax, financial and forensic are mentioned from time to time in COCA, whereas the collocation of “managerial accountant” have no correspondence in COCA, reflecting not enough emphasize on managerial accounting from 1990 to 2017; 3) in the category of Corrective Careers, it’s not difficult to dig out that accountants usually have close connection with lawyer or attorney, banker, financial planner, auditor, financial adviser and actuary; 4) in the category of Firms & Organizations, it’s intriguing to explore the connections among the firms and organizations collocating with accountant, for example, Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand are shown separately instead of in the name of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), revealing the historical development of an accounting firm by exploring COCA.