A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Four-word Lexical Bundles In M.A.Theses By Chinese Postgraduates Of English And Native Postgraduates

With the development of corpus linguistics, the study of lexical bundles is gaining more and more attention from scholars, for the mastery of lexical bundles is regarded as a measurement of fluent language production, especially in academic writing.Among the previous studies undertaken at home and abroad, most of them focus on the use of lexical bundles by native learners, or on the differences of lexical bundles used by native experts and those by native learners, or the differences between native speakers/writers and foreign language learners. Few concerns the differences between native postgraduates and non-native postgraduates.The present study aimed to find out the differences of the use of four-word lexical bundles between Chinese postgraduates and native postgraduates in the field of linguistics. It attempted to investigate the use of four-word lexical bundles rather than three or five words lexical bundles, because many four-word lexical bundles contains three-word lexical bundles in structure, for example, as a result is incorporated in as a result of, I don’t think so contains I don’t think, and five-word lexical bundles are less frequently used than four-word lexical bundles.In order to probe into the research questions, two corpora of M.A. theses on English linguistics were established, one written by native postgraduates, as non-native writer corpus (NWC) and the other by Chinese postgraduates, as native writer corpus (NNWC). The study was conducted to address the following questions:(1) How would the four-word lexical bundles be distributed in NNWC and NWC?(2) What would be the most frequent four-word lexical bundles in NNWC and NWC respectively? Would there be any significant differences in the use of lexical bundles between them?(3) What would be the differences of four-word lexical bundles in terms of the structural categories in two corpora?(4)What would be the differences of four-word lexical bundles in terms of the functional categories in two corpora?The corpora had a total of about75thousand words. All four-word lexical bundles in two corpora were classified and described, and compared both structurally and functionally. The top40bundles in both corpora were studied in detail. Frequency-based approach was adopted to give a quantitative and qualitative analysis as regards the similarities and differences between the four-word lexical bundles used by native postgraduates and those by Chinese postgraduates.The findings in the study are shown as follows:(1) Chinese postgraduates had a greater reliance on four-word lexical bundles to build text.(2) As for the40top four-word lexical bundles, two corpora differed greatly in types and frequencies of lexical bundles. Chinese postgraduates overused most of the four-word lexical bundles shared by both corpora, which might have been attributable to their inflexibility in the use of four-word lexical bundles.(3) Structurally, in NNWC and NWC, there were more phrasal bundles than clausal bundles, but the percentages of each of the most frequent phrasal bundle were different in the two corpora.(4) Functionally, discourse organizing bundles and referential bundles took up the largest part in both corpora with different percentages of each sub-category between the two corpora.With these findings, this study provides interesting insights into the characteristics of the Chinese postgraduates’using of four-word lexical bundles in their academic writing production. This study has important implications for the teaching and learning of lexical bundles in English writing, especially for academic purpose, in the classroom. Based on the previous findings and discussion, this study finally comes to an objective analysis of its limitations and provides suggestions for future research on.