LEXICAL BUNDLES ACROSS DISCIPLINES: THE CASE OF RESEARCH ARTICLES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Abstract

In order for an academic text to be considered appropriate in the community, it needs to exhibit disciplinary and cultural-based linguistic conventions. With the advances in corpus linguistics, scholars have been able to reveal the employment of these conventions in academic genres, one of which is lexical bundles. Simply defined as recurrent word combinations, lexical bundles reflect prominent functions in academic genres, as they deal with discourse organization, writer-reader negotiation, and stance construction, all of which achieve academic persuasion. Although the previous research has established the importance of lexical bundles, there is much less information about the disciplinary variations in the use of lexical bundles in academic genres. Adopting an automated frequency-driven approach, this research attempted to identify lexical bundles in research articles in the social sciences. Based on the investigation of 4-word lexical bundles in a corpus of research articles written between 2010 and 2019 in applied linguistics, marketing, and political sciences, we observed an impact of disciplinary variation on the overall lexical bundle usages. Concerning the structural and functional distributions of word strings, we observed differences across the disciplines, indicating that the academic communities might have a decisive role in text construction, yielding divergence across the disciplines in the social sciences. Despite differences, we also observed some similarities regarding the structural and functional sequences of bundles across the disciplines, indicating that the social sciences, an umbrella field in academia, has its own merits resulting in convergence across different disciplines.