Lexical bundles in chemistry research articles: Structural constituency analysis

dr Javad Zare, Kosar University of Bojnord, Iran, ID LLCE2018-327;    Abstract: Research on language use shows that language is formulaic in nature. It is now claimed that awareness of formulas or bundles, i.e. recurrent multi-word combinations, facilitates language learning and leads to successful language production. Lexical bundles are believed to be peculiar to a certain genre or register, and discipline. This research report focusses on a corpus-driven study which explored the frequency and diversity of lexical bundles in published chemistry research articles. The investigation involved structural analysis of lexical bundles generated from a corpus of four million words, comprising 1,185 chemistry research articles. WordSmith was used to generate four-word lexical bundles and to concordance examples, based on a minimum frequency of 20 times per million words and occurrence in at least five different texts. Altogether, the results revealed 223 frequent lexical bundles. More than 55% of the bundles were phrasal; 35% of the bundles were clausal. Prepositional phrase bundles outnumbered noun phrase bundles in terms of frequency, whereas noun phrase bundles outnumbered prepositional phrase bundles in diversity.

Keywords: lexical bundle, structural analysis, chemistry research article