A Corpus-based Study On The Features Of Four-word Lexical Bundles In Business English

"Lexical bundles are the recurrent sequences of word combination of three or more words."(Biber et al.,2000).They are structural and semantic units which frequently occur in the natural language and well reveal the language characteristics of a certain field,so they are the important materials for English language study,especially for the ESP(English for Special Purpose)study.At the same time,better understanding of lexical bundles can improve English learners' fluency and accuracy of expressions.The traditional investigation of lexical bundles depends on the basis of researchers' manual screening.The advantage of corpus method is based on a large number of authentic data to extract,retrieve and analyze materials,which avoids the subjectivity and inefficiency of manual screening and enables the results to be more objective and reliable.This study aims to find out the unique features of high-frequency lexical bundles in Business English on the structures and functions.Based on Business English corpus,adopting the guidance of Biber's twelve types of structural classification and three groups of functional classification of lexical bundles,this study makes a comparison between Business English corpus and General English corpus.The results show that:(1)The frequent four-word bundles in Business English cover 9 structural categories.(2)The frequent four-word bundles can be classified into three categories functionally,among which referential bundles take up 73%.(3)The lexical bundle plays an important role in building blocks of coherent discourse,and it is also associated with basic communicative functions.(4)There are some unique features of four-word lexical bundles used in Business English.The results of this research are beneficial for the compilation of Business English textbooks,Business English dictionary and the relevant teaching materials.Meanwhile,the study can promote the development of Business English teaching and research.