A Comparative Study On Lexical Bundles In English Journals Of Chinese And Foreign Applied Linguistics

The present study makes comparative research on lexical bundles of Chinesescholars and English native scholars in the field of English journals of appliedlinguistics. The study is based on the self-built corpus of academic writings in thefield of applied linguistics written by Chinese scholars and English native scholars.N-gram analysis and amendment will be applied to extract the target lexical bundlesand the method of qualitative combined quantitative analysis will be employed in thestudy. Comparative analysis will be conducted of Chinese and native scholars’general distributions of lexical bundles in the two corpora and the structure andfunction of four-word lexical bundles. Afterwards, characteristics of academicwriting in the field of applied linguistics written by Chinese scholars are summarized.The results show that academic papers written by Chinese scholars in the field ofapplied linguistics display some significant differences compared to those of nativescholars by virtue of statistical methods: For one, applying of short (3-word and4-word) lexical bundles shows significantly smaller than the native scholars;however, the standard TTR is abundant. For two, from the perspective of structure,nominal lexical bundles employed by Chinese scholars show significantly more thanthe native scholars, the prepositional lexical bundles show significant under-usecompared to the native scholars; from the perspective of function, referential lexicalbundles employed by Chinese scholars show significant under-use compared to thenative scholars. This paper explains and analyzes the statistical results in order toenrich the research on lexical bundles in the field of applied linguistics and provideguidance for academic writing in the field of applied linguistics. The study alsobenefits the teaching of lexis and writing in the discipline of applied linguistics.