A Contrastive Study Of Lexical Bundles In Published Academic Writings Of English And Chinese Scholars: A Corpus-based Approach

The phenomenon of frequent word combinations referred as lexical bundles hasattracted the attention of scholars both abroad and home. It was believed to be animportant component of fluent language productions and studied from different aspectsthrough various approaches. This study investigated and compared the use of lexicalbundles in published academic writings written by Chinese and English scholars. For thepurpose of this study, two corpora of Earth from12key periodicals were built respectively.The most frequent four-word lexical bundles occurring at least20times per million wordswere identified in each corpus under certain criteria and further categorized structurallyand functionally. The structural and functional features of each corpus were analyzed andthen compared across two corpora.The results of this study were divided into three parts. The general features of twocorpora are that Chinese scholars apply much more lexical bundles in academic writingsthan English scholars in both frequency and types. As for the structure distribution,prepositional phrase-based (PP) bundles are the majority among English scholars, whereasChinese scholars favor verb phrase-based (VP) bundles and the use of passive bundles isevidently frequent. Functional speaking, lexical bundles of native scholars tend to be moreresearch-oriented and text-oriented; there is a salient preference over the11sub-categoriesand framing functions have the largest proportion; Chinese scholars also tend to useresearch-oriented and text-oriented bundles and the preference over11sub-categories isnot very obvious. Both two groups mainly use research-oriented and text-oriented bundles.They both also use more phrasal than clausal bundles as well. Yet English scholars tend touse prepositional phrase-based (PP) and the major functions of lexical bundles are location,description and framing signals while Chinese scholars like verb phrase-based (VP) withtheir evenly distributed functions. The biggest differences exist in passive+prep phrasethat Chinese scholars overuse passive+prep phrase in their academic writings and thisstructure plays more functional roles.The current study demonstrates that lexical bundles are not only crucial to academicwriting, but also applied differently between natives and English language learners bothstructurally and functionally, which may also provide some insights for further studies andteachings of lexical bundles in academic field.