A Contrastive Study Of Lexical Bundles In The English Abstracts Of Theoretical Linguistics Journals

Lexical bundles refer to multi-word combinations that occur frequently in a particular text and are the basic building blocks of a text.Abstract,a summary of research papers,is taken as the most direct way for readers to obtain the authors? research information.There have been many studies on abstracts,while few of them concern the English abstracts in theoretical linguistics journals.In this study,289 English abstracts from a Chinese and 299 English abstracts from an English theoretical linguistics journal were selected from 2009-2019 respectively,and CH and EN English abstracts corpora were build and three-and four-word bundles by using Ant Conc3.5.7 were retrieved.Based on Lu and Deng?s(2019)and Hyland?s(2008b)classification of lexical bundles,this study made a contrastive analysis in the structure and function of lexical bundles in English abstracts of Chinese and foreign journals of theoretical linguistics.From the perspective of structure,significant differences took place in NP-based and clause-based bundles by Chinese writers and those by L1-English writers.Chinese scholars underused the “NP + of” beginning with article a/an/the.However,Chinese scholars overused bundles of verb phrase with passive voice and clause bundles with anticipatory it.In addition,some Chinese writers were also affected by the negative transfer of mother tongue.From the perspective of function,in the text-oriented bundles,Chinese writers used more conjunctions but fewer resultative bundles and verbal hedges that begin with personal pronouns.Moreover,Chinese scholars employed fewer engagement bundles in the participant-oriented bundles than English writers.What?s more,description and topic bundles in the research-oriented bundles also showed a great difference.In summary,Chinese scholars underused lexical bundles both structurally and functionally.Therefore,Chinese teachers should add more detailed courses of lexical bundles in academic English pedagogy to highlight the importance of lexical bundles.This study facilitates professional English abstracts? writing for Chinese scholars and enriches the existing research on lexical bundles in abstracts of language journals.