The Study Of Lexical Bundles In Research Article Conclusions Across Disciplines

Research article(RA)has been an important academic genre for researchers to communicate with peers and gain recognitions within their discourse communities.Different sections of research articles(e.g.,Introductions,Methods,Results and Discussions,Conclusions)are composed by professional writers to achieve unique communicative purposes.Therefore,the rhetorical structures of RA sections and various linguistic devices used in those subsections have become the research focus of genre studies.Specifically,researchers have focused on conducting the move analysis of different sections and on investigating the use of lexical bundles in RA sections.However,the most frequently researched RA sections have been the introductions and abstracts,little research has been conducted to RA conclusion sections.In addition,research has primarily focused on the macrostructures of each RA section,and few studies have been dedicated to investigating the connection between bundles and move structures.Besides,most of the studies on the subsections of RAs focused primarily on the macrostructures,the relationship between lexical bundles and move structures have not been fully explored.To explore how professional writers from different social and academic backgrounds use lexical bundles and how they associate bundles with each move to realize discourse functions,the current study investigates the disciplinary variations of using lexical bundles and the distribution patterns of bundles in each move and step.The present research employed Swales’(1990)definition of steps and moves from genre theory as well as corpus-driven and corpus-based methods to associate each bundle with move/step.Two corpora were established,namely,RA Conclusion Corpus of Hard Science(CCHS)and RA Conclusion Corpus of Soft Science(CCSS).CCSS includes 1500 Conclusion texts(536,134-word tokens)from Applied linguistics,Sociology,and Education.CCHS also contains 1500 texts(345,139-word tokens)from Biology,Engineering,and Physics.The corpus-driven method was realized by using Antconc 3.5.8 to extract four-word lexical bundles in CCSS and CCHS.Texts that include generated bundles were then imported into UAMCorpus Tool 3.3v2 to do corpus-based analysis which enables the coding of bundle function,structure,and move/step that the bundle belongs to.Two coders tagged 10% bundle tokens in each corpus.Cohen’s Kappa has been calculated by SPSS(25.0)to ensure the reliability between the two coders.Besides,loglikelihood tests were carried out to check if significant variations exist in the distribution of bundles in each move/step between hard and soft science.The results show that soft science Conclusion corpus generated 155 lexical bundle types,3,990 bundle tokens while hard science Conclusion corpus contained 158 bundle types and2,518 bundle tokens.The findings of the study confirm that the dialogic communicative function of Conclusion section indeed influences the overall lexical bundle usage.It is also found that disciplinary variation exists in terms of bundle distribution in each move and step.The results of the study also indicate that writers from both fields usually make use of more resultative(e.g.the results of the study)and stance bundles(e.g.it is likely that)to achieve the communicative purpose of summarizing the finding and making implications of the RA Conclusion.It is also found that soft science writers tend to use more stance bundles in RA Conclusion,while hard science writers make more use of research-oriented bundles.In addition,soft science writers tend to use more noun phrase-based bundles,while hard science writers rely on the use of verb phrase-based bundles and clause-based bundles than their counterparts in soft field.The relationship between move and lexical bundle was detected.Triggering bundles have been found in triggering move/step,for example,conclusions can be drawn mark M1S1(presenting the overall findings),the limitations of the study is a signal bundle to help build M2S2(Indicating the limitations of the study)in soft field,and further research is needed triggers M3S1(recommending further research).Writers in both fields also use complement bundles to help them achieve the communicative functions of each move/step.The results of the current study can help novice writers better understand the disciplinary variations in constructing RA Conclusion sections and contribute to the genre knowledge of RA Conclusions in hard and soft fields.The findings can also be applied to academic writing class.By integrating with genre theories,language practitioners can teach novice writers how to use move/step specific bundles to improve their academic writing.