A Corpus-based Study Of Lexical Bundles In Diplomatic Interpreting

Lexical bundles are semi-prefabricated or prefabricated structural units which can be extracted directly after being stored in memory.Some studies about lexical bundles and interpreting have proved that lexical bundle has a positive impact on interpreting fluency and accuracy.Many previous studies compared lexical bundles used by student interpreters and professional interpreters to discover their differences.They suggested that interpreters should raise the awareness of learning and using lexical bundles to improve their interpreting performance.However,the better way to examine the use of lexical bundles in interpreted English is to compare them with non-interpreted English.Therefore,based on the self-built corpora ICECPC and NECPC,this paper makes a comparative study of lexical bundles in diplomatic interpreted English and noninterpreted English,and to answer three questions: 1)How do the types and frequencies of 4-,5-6-word lexical bundles vary between interpreters and English native speakers? 2)What are structural differences of 4-word lexical bundles used by interpreters and English native speakers? 3)What are the reasons for these differences? This paper adopts and revises the structural classification of lexical bundles put forward by Douglas Biber,which divided lexical bundles into verb phrase fragments,dependent clause fragments,noun phrase and prepositional phrase fragments.AntConc,a corpus analyzer software,will be used to extract 4-to 6-word lexical bundles with the lowest frequency of 2 and minimum range of 3 texts.Analysis will be divided into three phases to answer three questions respectively.The result shows that 1)When the length of lexical bundles increases,types and frequencies of them decline and TTR climbs a little bit instead.2)Interpreters outstrip native speakers in terms of the types and frequencies of lexical bundles.3)Interpreters use most noun and preposition phrases among three categories while native speakers make most verb phrase fragments.4)Differences of discourse style between Chinese and American press conferences,as well as the need to ease cognitive pressure are two main reasons to explain the differences.This study can be regarded as an evidence that full of lexical bundles is one of the features of interpreted English in diplomatic occasions.