Abstract
The purpose of the study is to examine the discourse functions of lexical bundles in written university registers. Lexical bundles which are frequently found in written academic discourse are examined in order to analyze their functions in this register, comparing the frequency of each function. As the written register, theses of 72 EFL students were randomly chosen. The categorization was constructed based on the functional framework of lexical bundles in discourse offered by Biber et al. Every 4-word sequence in the theses was identified. The most frequent 4-word bundles in the theses were categorized and discussed accordingly. Key words: Academic setting, EFL learners, lexical bundles,discourse functions, written discourse.
Highlights
The term ‘lexical bundle’ comes from the field of corpus linguistics
The term ‘lexical bundle’ first explicitly appeared in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber and Conrad, 1999), a monumental work entirely based on the British National Corpus of 100 million words
As an exploration of the discourse functions of lexical bundles in written registers, this study addresses the following four research questions: Table 2 highlights the fact that many of the most frequent 4-word bundles in academic writing are very
Summary
The term ‘lexical bundle’ comes from the field of corpus linguistics. It was defined as “the most frequent recurring lexical sequences which can be regarded as extended collocations: sequences of three or more words that show a statistical tendency to co-occur (e.g., in the case of the)”(Biber and Conrad, 1999). The term ‘lexical bundle’ comes from the field of corpus linguistics. It was defined as “the most frequent recurring lexical sequences which can be regarded as extended collocations: sequences of three or more words that show a statistical tendency to co-occur (e.g., in the case of the)”. The term ‘lexical bundle’ first explicitly appeared in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber and Conrad, 1999), a monumental work entirely based on the British National Corpus of 100 million words. In addition to Biber and Conrad's term, these multiword items have been studied under different terms such as fixed expressions (Moon, 1998), lexical phrases (Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992), pre-fabs, readymade units, routines, formulas, using different criteria to define and identify multi-word items
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