Lexical bundles in Wikipedia articles and related texts

Abstract

Wikipedia is widely used by academics and students in higher education, but research on the linguistic characteristics of this genre is scarce (Kuteeva 2016). This paper explores the usefulness of lexical bundles as an analytical tool to describe disciplinary variation within Wikipedia articles, and to contrast Wikipedia writing with two neighbouring genres, student essays and research articles. The results indicate that the occurrence of lexical bundles in Wikipedia varies between disciplines, which is in broad agreement with previous studies on other academic genres. The analysis of bundles also suggests that a credible authorial persona is less crucial to Wikipedia articles. Indicative of this is the low frequency of bundles indicating stance and engagement, which are characteristic of professional academic writing (e.g. Hyland 2008a).

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).…”