A Corpus-based Study On The Lexical Bundles Features Of English Abstracts In CSSCI Foreign Language Journals

A lexical bundle is a multi-word sequence that occurs frequently in a certain number of texts.Proper use of lexical bundles can help improve the convincingness of academic discourses(Biber,1999).At present,the study of corpus is mainly based on theoretical research and corpus research.Theoretical research mainly focuses on the perspective of applied linguistics and cognitive linguistics.These two methods are concerned with introducing non-empirical research such as foreign theories and domestic practice or constructive grammar based on cognitive linguistics.The corpus method has gradually become a new method for studying lexical bundles.The development of large-scale corpus software and indexing software have provided the foundation for the development of corpus linguistics,which is of great significance for the study of lexical bundle rules.Many domestic scholars use corpora as the basis to study the role of lexical bundles of non-native speakers in learning English,and make a comparative analysis built on the classroom.However,few people have involved the terminology of native and non-native writers’ academic discourses.This article explores the similarities and differences between the linguistic articles by native English scholars and the CSSCI foreign language articles by Chinese scholars.First,the author collected 100 abstracts of each of the two types of foreign language journals in the past 10 years,and the native language journals include Applied Linguistics,Annual Review of Applied Linguistics,the Modern Language and Journal of Second Language Writing while the Chinese foreign language journals consist of Foreign Language Teaching and Research,Modern Foreign Languages,Foreign Languages in china,and TEFLE,and established two small corpus,using Ant Conc 3.4.4 and Long-likelihood Ration Caculator software and manual work to extract 3 to 6 words lexical bundles from the two small corpora,respectively and finally get valid bundles and frequency numbers;then the author analyze the statistics from the perspective of the structure and function of bundles,which are based on Biber’s definition and structural classification theory,and the lexical bundles are divided into 8 kinds.According to Hyland’s functional methods designed for academic discourses,the effective bundles are divided into research-oriented bundles,text-oriented bundles,participant-oriented bundles,and made statistical and comparative analysis.This article mainly investigates the following three issues:(1)What are the distributions of 3 to 6 words lexical bundles in the two corpora?(2)Based on Biber’s classification theory,what are the structural similarities and differences of the lexical bundles in the abstracts of native and non-native academic discourses?(3)Based on Hyland’s function theory,what are the functional similarities and differences of lexical bundles in the two corpora?In comparative studies,the results showed that 3 words bundles accounted for the largest proportion of abstracts in two corpora,and the distribution of 3 to 6 words bundles in the two corpora is almost same,with the smallest number of 6 words bundles.From the perspective of the structure of the lexical bundles,the bundles’ structure of native English writer is concentrated on the noun-phrases ones,and the prepositional phrases’ bundles are at the second place.The gap between the two type is not large.Non-native writers also pay attention to the noun-phrases bundles.On the contrary,there is a large gap between the number of noun phrase bundles and prepositional phrase bundles.From a functional point of view,research-oriented bundles occupy a large proportion in the two corpora,especially in 3 words bundles,text-oriented bundles do not occupy a significant proportion in non-native writers’ corpus,which is obvious especially in 6 words bundles of native writer.Non-native writers use participantoriented chunks less.The trend is reflected in non-native 4 words lexical bundles.The proper use of lexical bundles can to some extent reflect the ability of scholars to understand and use academic language.This study analyzes the similarities and differences in the use of lexical bundles between Chinese and foreign scholars by means of comparing the lexical bundles features of their academic writings.At the same time,the paper can also provide some lessons that improve English translation of the abstracts in CSSCI Foreign Language Journals.