A Corpus-Driven Study Of The Structures And Functions Of Lexical Bundles In Academic Writings Of Native Scholars And Chinese Scholars

With the rise of corpus linguistics, the study of lexical bundles is receiving more attention from scholars. Lexical bundles are an important component of fluent linguistic production. Bundles in different genres (e.g. conversation and academic writings) vary considerably. Bundles in different disciplines also differ to a certain degree. If learners or L2 writers fail to use bundles appropriately, their linguistic production will seem unnatural or unprofessional.Among the related studies conducted at home and abroad, most of them focus on the differences between bundles used by native experts and (native or L2) learners, few concern L2 writers. Besides, only a few researches investigate bundles of specific disciplines, and there is hardly any study of bundles in telecommunication field. This study establishes two electronic corpora of English research papers on telecommunication written by native scholars and Chinese scholars, with a total of about 1 million words. All 4-word bundles in two corpora are classified and compared in terms of their structures and functions, and the top 50 bundles in two corpora are studied in detail. The aim of this study is to discover the similarities and differences between bundles used by native scholars and Chinese scholars. The findings are as follows: Chinese scholars have a greater reliance on bundles to construct texts. Structurally, in Chinese scholar corpus (CTEC), there are more clausal bundles than phrasal bundles, contrary to the case in native scholar corpus (NTEC). Functionally, research-oriented bundles take up the largest proportion in both corpora, but the percentages of each major category or sub-category are different between two corpora. As for the top 50 bundles, two corpora differ considerably in the types and frequencies of bundles. Bundles of specific structural or functional category in two corpora are also different. Some bundles are misused or inappropriately used by Chinese scholars in terms of meaning, word class, collocation, etc.The characteristics of the structural and functional distributions of bundles in NTEC further prove the findings of some previous researches, that is, the bundles in academic proses are more phrasal than clausal in nature, and in writings of hard sciences, research-oriented bundles take up the largest proportion. The findings regarding the distributional, structural, functional and pragmatic characteristics of bundles in CTEC will enrich studies of bundles used by learners or non-native writers, and can provide guidance for ESP or EAP teaching.