Lexical Bundles in Humanities and Natural Sciences

lexical bundles and language variation

Vilnius University Faculty of Philology Department of English Philology

Gintar÷ Strunkyt÷ and Egl÷ Jurkūnait÷

Written Academic Discourse: Lexical Bundles in Humanities and

Natural Sciences

Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of BA in

English Philology

Supervisor: Dr Augustina Stungien÷

2008

lexical bundles and language variation

Acknowledgements

We are particularly grateful for the advice and encouragement of our supervisor Dr Augustina Stungien÷. We have greatly profited from her material provided to us, which has contributed enormously to the comprehensiveness of this research. We also like to thank Dr Inesa eskauskien÷, whose course on Academic Discourse was very helpful in arranging our research paper. Our thanks also go to our colleagues for useful comments on earlier drafts.

We would like to thank Dr Mike Scott from the University of Liverpool, who kindly provided us with the license for his WordSmith Tools computer programme. We also wish to thank Dovil÷ Savickait÷ for contacting with Viviana Cortes, who allowed to use her research articles. All the errors that remain, however, are our own.

lexical bundles and language variation

1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 5 2. Data and Methods ........................................................................................................................ 9 3. Results and Discussion .............................................................................................................. 10 3.1 Distribution of lexical bundles ............................................................................................. 10 3.2 Structural analysis ................................................................................................................ 12 3.3. Functional analysis ............................................................................................................. 19 3.3.1. Stance bundles ............................................................................................................. 20 3.3.2. Text organizing bundles ............................................................................................... 21 3.3.3. Referential bundles ...................................................................................................... 21 3.4 The relationship between structural and functional categories ............................................ 26 4. Conclusions ................................................................................................................................ 28 5. Summary in Lithuanian ............................................................................................................. 30 6. References .................................................................................................................................. 31

lexical bundles and language variation

This paper investigates the use of frequent word combinations referred to as ‘lexical bundles’ in research articles in two broad disciplinary domains: humanities, represented by research articles in linguistics and educology, and natural sciences, represented by research articles in physics and astronomy. The aim of this study is to compare the use of lexical bundles in the two domains in terms of the frequency of occurrence and distribution of different structural and functional types across the subject areas. Lexical bundles in forty research articles (each domain represented by 20 articles) were identified using WordSmith Tools computer programme. The structural and functional types of lexical bundles found in the articles under analysis were described and compared. It was found that research articles in humanities contain a larger stock of lexical bundles than those in natural sciences. There are three main structural groups of lexical bundles that dominate in two domains: noun phrase with of-phrase fragment, noun phrase with other post-modifier fragment and prepositional phrase expression. As regards functional types, stance and referential bundles occurred more frequently in the articles in humanities, while discourse organizing and referential bundles prevailed in natural sciences articles. The study of the lexical bundles used in the research articles in humanities and natural sciences provided additional evidence for their importance as building blocks of discourse associated with basic communicative functions.

lexical bundles and language variation

1. Introduction

Linguists have been interested in sequences of words that tend to co-occur for quite a long time. Linguists have used different terms to refer to recurrent word combinations. One of the first to draw attention to recurrent word combinations was Firth (1957). He called them collocations but did not provide an explicit definition. Halliday et.al. (1964:33) gave a more detailed definition of a collocation which emphasized ‘the tendency of a lexical item to co-occur with one or more other words’. Other terms suggested by linguists were conventionalized language forms (Yorio 1979); speech formulas (Pawley 1985), ready-made expressions and multi-word units (Cowie 1988), and fixed expressions (Moon 1992) (all quoted in Cortes 2004). Although word sequences have been studied under many rubrics, linguists do not agree on the defining characteristics distinguishing one type of word combinations from another.

Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) also focused on prefabricated language which they found helpful because it can be easily memorized and re …… 此处隐藏：26580字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……