A comparative study of lexical bundles across paradigms and disciplines

Abstract

Research on lexical bundles has shed much light on disciplinary influences on the employment of these multi-word expressions in academic discourse, particularly in research articles. Little work, however, has been done on how research paradigms may impact on lexical bundles in academic discourse. This study aims to investigate the extent to which lexical bundles vary in quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research articles across two disciplines. All four-word lexical bundles were extracted from a specially built corpus of research articles and were analysed for their linguistic structures and discourse functions. The data analyses revealed marked structural and functional variation between different research paradigms and disciplines. Across paradigms, the quantitative articles differed from the qualitative articles by employing significantly more verb phrase bundles and participant-orientated functions whereas the qualitative articles employed significantly more prepositional phrase bundles and text-orientated functions. Across disciplines, the mixed methods articles in education employed significantly more noun phrase bundles and research-orientated functions, whereas the mixed methods articles in psychology used more prepositional bundles and text-orientated functions. These paradigmatic and disciplinary differences in lexical bundles are explained by examining the underlying perceptions of knowledge and knowledge-making practices in different research paradigms and disciplines.