A Contrastive Study Of Four-word Lexical Bundles In Business News In China Daily And The Economist Based On The Model Of Extended Units Of Meaning

Lexical bundle bridges the vocabulary and text and its acquisition is conducive to the construction of linguistic meaning units.Business reports play a pivotal role in exploring social themes and cultural differences.However,up to now,there has been little quantitative and in-depth analysis of lexical bundles in business news.And most of them are based on author intuition with surface features.Therefore,based on the model of Extended Units of Meaning and the co-selection theory,with the two selfbuilt corpora and comparative analysis approach,using statistical methods such as frequency and chi-square analysis,the current study investigates the similarities and differences of lexical bundles in frequency distribution,structural and functional features.Additionally,this study expounds its guiding role in business English teaching and business material compilation.Based on Biber’s classification of bundles,with the help of AntConc 3.4.4,the study extracts and analyzes bundles from the China Daily Corpus(hereafter this text will be abbreviated as CDC)and the Economist Corpus(hereafter this text will be abbreviated as TEC).The current study mainly investigates the following three questions: 1)What are the frequency distributions of four-word lexical bundles in CDC and TEC? 2)What are the main features of four-word lexical bundles in terms of structure and function in CDC and TEC respectively? 3)What are the similarities and differences of lexical bundles in CDC and TEC?The result indicates that: 1)Bundles in CDC and TEC are asymmetry in aspects of frequency distribution,structural and functional features.Firstly,bundles in CDC and TEC show significant differences in frequency distribution and structural features.There are more but less varied bundles in CDC.CDC and TEC show significant differences in structures of NP-based,PP-based and clausal fragments bundles.Secondly,bundles in CDC and TEC show partial resemblance,however,they bear greater heterogenicity due to differences in social reality.Finally,both CDC and TEC tend to use bundles function as referential and context-dependent expressions,but they also enjoy significant differences in terms of usage frequency.2)Multi-dimension and complexity are characteristic of bundles in CDC and TEC.The co-selections between lexis and lexis,lexis and grammar,patterns and meanings form a continuum and a complex dynamic system.The present study not only expands the application of the model of Extended Units of Meaning and co-selection theory in study of lexical bundles in the business news but is also instructive for Business English teaching and learning,Business English dictionary compilation and related textbook writing.