Corpus-based Study On Lexical Bundles In Chemical Academic Writing

In recent years, formulaic language has been receiving increasing attention in language research due to its important role in the production of fluent and native-like language in spoken and written genres. This study investigates the use of a special type of formulaic language - lexical bundles ("a sequence of three or more words that co-occur frequently in a particular register"), in the published chemical academic writings by scholars.For the purpose of the study, a corpus of published scientific research articles was made and LOB corpus was used as a reference. Extracting with the help of word processing program AntConc3.4.3.0, this study makes analyses on the distribution, structural and functional classifications of lexical bundles in chemical academic writing.The results show that:(1) In chemical academic writing, lexical bundles occur frequently, and with the lexical bundles become longer, the lexical bundles types and their corresponding frequencies become lesser. (2) Most lexical bundles are incomplete structural units and lexical bundles of a given length are incorporated into its corresponding longer ones. They are not idiomatic in meaning and the meaning of them is transparent. (3) The four-word lexical bundles in chemical academic writing cover 12 structural groups. Among them, the percentage of noun phrase (32%), prepositional phrase (29%) and verb phrase (34%), each account for one third of the total bundles approximately. (4) The four-word lexical bundles can be classified into three categories functionally:research-oriented, text-oriented and participant-oriented, among which, research-oriented, text-oriented lexical bundles account for 94.3%. (5) There are some unique features of lexical bundles used in chemical academic writing.These findings are beneficial for scholars on chemical research to produce native-like scientific research articles and to promote the chemistry English teaching in class.