Lexical Bundles In Business Media Discourse

The present study investigates the use of four-word lexical bundles(LBs)in business media discourse by addressing the following three research questions:(1)what are the differences between LBs in spoken business media discourse and LBs in written business media discourse in terms of their frequencies?(2)What are the structural characteristics of LBs in spoken and written business media discourse respectively?(3)What are the functional characteristics of LBs in spoken and written business media discourse respectively?The Economist Corpus(ECO)consisting of texts from The Economist and the Business Live Corpus(BLC)consisting of transcripts of the program BBC Business Live,are employed to answer the research questions above.The most frequent four-word lexical bundles in two corpora are firstly computed with a cut-off point of at least 20 times per million via Word Smith Tools 5.0.After the extraction,these bundles are studies in term their frequencies,grammatical structures and functions respectively.The results show that(1)the spoken corpus BLC employs more than twice as many four-word lexical bundles as ECO.(2)BLC uses a wider range of structural types of LBs with 16 structural types,while only 10 types occur in ECO with noun and prepositional bundles accounting for the majority.Furthermore,different from the case for BLC,ECO uses more LBs with 3rd person subjects,which indicates a higher level of detachment.(3)Regarding the functions of LBs,both BLC and ECO cover a great variety of functional types,even though the number of items in each category can differ sharply.What is worth emphasizing is that BLC contains a considerable number of bundles specific to its own and ECO uses very few discourse organizing and stance bundles.Moreover,ECO tends to use impersonal stance bundles rather than personal ones,which indicates a higher degree of objectivity.Pedagogically speaking,the findings,particularly the bundles extracted from two corpora,provide reliable teaching and learning materials and could be effective in helping second language learners be equipped with media vocabulary.However,it is not without limitation,as many of the most frequent bundles do not seem to show a high level of business inclination.Future research could go further to explore the use of particular LBs or a particular functional or structural category rather.Moreover,they could put more emphasis on more abstract grammatical structures LBs rather than strings of words or less frequently used bundles.