A Comparative Study Of Lexical Bundles In Academic Writing Of Native Expert Writers In Different Disciplines

Lexical bundles,also regarded as word sequences,can contribute greatly to language proficiency,fluency and native-likeness in both written and spoken registers for they are stored and retrieved as a whole in memory to help construct the discourse.There have been a number of studies in the fields concerning with lexical bundles at home and abroad,such as the definitions and classifications of lexical bundles.The research on the bundle differences between native speakers and EFL learners is especially booming.However,few are conducted on the research of lexical bundles in different disciplines.This thesis conducts a comparative study on lexical bundles across four disciplines,which are physics,engineering,linguistics and management,to illustrate the distribution features,structural and functional characteristics of these disciplines.Moreover,possible explanations on the similarities and differences are given.The results and findings in this study are presented here:First,the frequencies of lexical bundles differ a lot.Furthermore,expert writers in physics and management have more reliance on lexical bundles.However,a greater diversity of lexical bundles can be seen in management while physics has a lack of variety.On the other hand,expert writers in physics and engineering are more likely to repeatedly employ a certain group of three-word lexical bundles.Because the academic articles in physics and engineering need precise statistics and calculations to make the research procedures and findings more objective,the expert writers in these two disciplines tend to repeatedly use lexical bundles.From the top 50 bundles,there are nine common shared bundles and cognate disciplines share more lexical bundles.Second,NP-based and PP-based bundles play dominant roles in the structural patterns,establishing the contexts in these four disciplines.Expert writers majoring in linguistics and management have a preference for NP-based bundles while there are more PP-based bundles and VP-based bundles in physics and engineering.In the main structural categories,there are three frequent and productive frames.The language convention in linguistics is more phrasal,meanwhile,hard sciences have a great reliance on abstract and graphic technical communication.Third,functionally it is found that even though expert writers in all disciplines use considerably the largest proportions of research-oriented bundles and the fewest participant-oriented bundles,their use of bundles in main functions and sub-functions differs a great deal.Expert writers in physics employ more framing signals and procedure bundles,engineering expert writers use more structuring signals,while expert writers in linguistics use a large proportion of location bundles and management expert writers tend to rely on description bundles.On the whole,the use of lexical bundles is dominated by discipline.Physics and engineering are more restricted to the disciplinary language conventions.Moreover,significant similarities can be noticed in cognate disciplines on distribution features,structural and functional patterns.The above findings can provide some pedagogical implications for EAP and EFL teaching and the compilation of relevant textbooks for academic writing.