Lexical Bundles in Research Articles: A Corpus-driven study

Lexical bundles, as a category of frequent word expressions defined as statistical tendency of words to co-occur, have very recently appealed to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) researchers because they renderacademic discourse as natural as possible.Adopting a corpus-driven approach, the researchers examined thefrequency, structure, and function of lexical bundles in a 4,370,630 million-word corpus across seven Psychology sub-disciplines comprising 1,452 research articles in psychology (RAP) and consisting of two subcorpora: English corpus (EC) and Persian corpus (PC). The corpora were analyzed, using WordSmith Toolscomputer programme (version 6) to identify the frequency and dispersion of lexical bundles. The analysis of thedata showed there were 266 lexical bundles (144 4-word, 68 5-word, and 54 6-word lexical bundles) in RAPCorpus. Furthermore, 416 (254 4-word, 115 5-word, and 47 6-word lexical bundles) and 316 (116 4-word, 104 5-word, and 96 6-word lexical bundles) lexical bundles were identified in EC and PC, respectively.Furthermore, 37, 16, and 8 4-, 5-, and 6-word lexical bundles were shared between EC and PC, respectively.The findings revealed that Persian writers used not only fewer lexical bundles but also different structural andfunctional lexical bundles than did English writers.

کلیدواژه ها:

lexical bundles ، frequency ، corpus ، structures ، functions