Lexical bundles in maritime texts

Abstract

Lexical bundles are recurring frequent word combinations. Research has shown that lexical bundles vary in genre and register (Biber 2006; Biber, Conrad and Cortes 2004; Hyland 2008a, 2008b; Scott and Tribble 2006). However, the degree to which they vary by discipline remains inconclusive. The main aim of this paper is to establish whether lexical bundles are discipline specific, i.e., whether each discipline draws on a specialized lexical repertoire or whether there is a core vocabulary shared across various disciplines. For that purpose, maritime texts covering the subdomains marine engineering, navigation, maritime law and shipping have been collected so as to investigate the structure and function of lexical bundles and to find out how they shape meaning in specialized discourse. For the purposes of the study, a 7.4 M corpus consisting of two monolingual subcorpora and one bilingual subcorpus was compiled. This corpus can be used as a basis for further studies in the field. Furthermore, the paper discusses problems encountered while extracting N-grams from a corpus, as well as classification criteria for the identification of lexical bundles. The results show that lexical bundles identified in maritime texts are phrasal rather than clausal. The results also indicate that lexical bundles are discipline specific. Teaching these specialized features that shape discourse can improve students’ language production and should thus be the focus of instruction in ESP.

Mapping shared lexical bundles onto rhetorical moves in nursing research articles: A comparative study of paradigmatic variation

“…Focusing on research articles, PhD dissertations and Master's theses in four disciplines of electrical engineering, biology, business studies, and applied linguistics, Hyland (2008: 13-14) classified a bundle as research-oriented when it "helps writers to structure their activities and experiences of the real world" (e.g., the use of the, the structure of the), as text-oriented when it is "concerned with the organisation of the text and its meaning as a message or argument" (e.g., in the next section, in the case of), and as participant-oriented when it "conveys the writer's attitudes and evaluations" or "addresses readers directly" (e.g., are likely to be, it should be noted). These two functional frameworks proposed by Biber et al (2004) and Hyland (2008) have been widely applied to investigate bundle functions in research writing, such as exploring variation across registers (e.g., Biber and Barbieri 2007), L1 and L2 speakers of English (e.g., Ädel andErman 2012), anddisciplines (e.g., Durrant 2017;Hiltunen 2018;Borucinsky and Pritchard 2022).…”