A Comparative Study On The Features Of Four-word Lexical Bundles In China-uk English Business News From L2 Acquisition Perspective

In recent years,an increasing number of lexical bundles researches have been witnessed at home and abroad.When it comes to lexical bundles,the pivotal elements to the fluency and accuracy of language production,the previous studies of lexical bundles mainly focus on the pedagogical aspects in second language acquisition,the characteristics of lexical bundles in English learners' thesis writing,and the differences of academic writing between English native speakers and non-native speakers,but few studies have explored lexical bundles from ESP field.In this study,two corpora are established.One is EC corpus which stands for English business news extracted from The Economist,the other is CD corpus which stands for English business news extracted from China Daily.Each corpus contains592 pieces of English business news.The published date of all English business news ranges from the year of 2016 to the year of 2017.From the perspective of second language acquisition,based on Biber et al's structural and functional classification of lexical bundles,this present study attempts to explore the features of four-word lexical bundles from structural and functional perspectives.The author intends to answer three research questions:1.What are the distributional features of four-word lexical bundles in EC corpus and CD corpus?2.What are the structural and functional characteristics of four-word lexical bundles in EC corpus and CD corpus?3.What are the similarities and differences of these four-word lexical bundles used in the two corpora from the structural and functional perspectives?The major findings demonstrate that there are 64 four-word lexical bundles in EC corpus but 137 four-word lexical bundles in CD corpus,which implies that four-word lexical bundles are preferred by Chinese journalists.From the structural perspective,in the two corpora,the widely used four-word lexical bundles are prepositional phrase bundles and noun phrase bundles.However,the different ratio of each type of four-word lexical bundles in individual corpus varies a lot.From the functional perspective,referential bundles are used frequently in the two corpora.However,compared with the other two functional categories,that is,stance bundles and discourse organizing bundles,English business news written by native journalists relies more on referential four-word lexical bundles than English business newswritten by Chinese journalists.The above findings can not only provide certain implications to both writing and teaching of English business news,but also extend the field of lexical bundles in certain fields.What's more,the limitations and suggestions for further research have also been put forward in the present study.