A Corpus-based Comparative Analysis Of Four-word Lexical Bundles In M.A. Theses Of English Linguistics Between Natives And Non-natives

With the development of corpus linguistics, lexical bundles have attracted more and more attention from scholars because lexical bundles are important to the fluency and accuracy of language production, especially in academic writing. According to Biber et al.(1999), lexical bundles are recurring sequences of three or more words. Most of previous studies no matter in abroad or at home focus on the use of lexical bundles by the native learners, or on the comparative studies between different registers, or on the comparative studies of lexical bundles used by learners and experts(Biber et al. 1999; Cortes 2004; Biber & Barbiber 2007). There are few studies which relates to the comparative analysis of lexical bundles in English linguistics theses written by Chinese postgraduates and native English postgraduates.Based on the corpus approach,this paper aims to find out the similarities and differences in their using of four-word lexical bundles through the comparative analysis of four-word lexical bundles in M.A. theses employed by Chinese postgraduates and native English postgraduates. The reason why four-word lexical bundles are the research object in this study is that many three-word lexical bundles are included in four-word lexical bundles and five-word lexical bundles or even other longer word lexical bundles are less frequently used.In the present study, two corpora of M.A. theses of English linguistics are established. One is Chinese postgraduates’ M.A. theses corpus which is abbreviated as CPC and the other is native speaking postgraduates’ M.A. theses corpus which is abbreviated as NPC. CPC contains 80 theses which are collected from CNKI and NPC contains 72 theses which are collected from ProQuest. Each corpus in the present study contains about 1,400,000 words. Antconc is used to identify four-word lexical bundles. According to Biber et al.’s(1999) definition and structural classification and Biber et al.’s(2004) functional classification of lexical bundles, a quantitative and qualitative analysis is made to analyse the four-word lexical bundles from three perspectives: frequencies distributions, structures and functions.The present study is conducted to research the following questions:1) What are the patterns of frequency distribution of four-word lexical bundles in the two corpora?2) What are the structural and functional features of four-lexical bundles in the two corpora?3) What are the similarities and differences of the four-word lexical bundles in terms of the structural type and the functional type in the two corpora?Generally speaking,the findings illustrate that: 1) Chinese postgraduates use more four-word lexical bundles in their theses writing than native speaker postgraduates do. There are 104 four-word lexical bundles but 68 four-word lexical bundles in NPC;2) There are significant differences in numbers and frequencies of four-word lexical bundles between the two corpora. In addition, Chinese postgraduates are more likely to use some four-word lexical bundles repeatedly. The total frequency of 104 four-word lexical bundles in CPC is 6357 and the total frequency of 68 four-word lexical bundles in NPC is 4168; 3) structurally, most of the four-word lexical bundles in two corpora are prepositional phrases bundles and noun phrases bundles. The percentages of four-word lexical bundles in different structures vary in both two corpora. On the whole,the structural differences of four-word lexical bundles between the two corpora are not significant; 4) Functionally, most of the four-word lexical bundles are referential bundles and discourse organizing bundles in the two corpora, but the percentages of four-word lexical bundles in certain sub-categories are different. On the whole, the functional differences of four-word lexical bundles between the two corpora are significant.With these findings, this study provides certain insights into the characteristics of the Chinese postgraduates’ use of four-word lexical bundles in their theses. This study is not only helpful to Chinese postgraduates’ English theses writing but also helpful to English teaching and the leaning of lexical bundles. Based on the previous findings and discussion, this study also gives an objective analysis of its limitations and provides suggestions for future studies.