| The phenomenon of formulaic expressions has long since attracted the attention of the researchers in linguistic field for such expressions are believed to play an important role in both spoken and written forms of fluent linguistic production. This thesis investigates a special type of formulaic expressions — lexical bundles, which was defined as a sequence of three or more words that co-occur frequently in a particular register in Biber et al.'s (2000) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, based on the collected data from an English language corpus that consists of 93 published linguistic journal articles written by native authors with a total of 809,482 words.The main body of this thesis can be divided into two major parts. The first part focuses on the identification of frequent four-word lexical bundles that are analyzed in the present study. The second part attends to the classifications and analyses of these identified bundles in terms of structure and function.The findings of this study indicate that lexical bundles are a unique linguistic construct which not only have systematic structural characteristics, but also serve important discourse functions in academic linguistic writing. Most lexical bundles are not complete structural units but parts of noun phrases or prepositional phrases; most of them bridge two structural units. They are important lexical building blocks within the register of academic linguistic writing associated with basic communicative functions, expressing stance, signaling the discourse organization, or providing referential frames.The paper concludes with some pedagogic implications of teaching and learning lexical bundles in EFL field. In addition, the limitations of this research and recommendations for further study are also provided. |
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