Key Lexical Chunks in Article Abstracts of 30 Applied Linguistics Journals

In any discourse domain, certain chunks are particularly frequent and deserve attention by the novice to be initiated and by the expert to maintain a sense of community. To make a relevant contribution to the awareness about applied linguistics texts and discourse, this study attempted to develop lists of lexical chunks frequently used in the abstracts of applied linguistics journals. The abstracts from all the issues of 30 applied linguistics journals which were published before August 1, 2013 were collected. These abstracts which generated a corpus of 2,750,000 words were submitted to the program AntConc for chunk extraction. The long list of chunks in the output was shortlisted based on frequency and inclusiveness of shorter chunks. These were classified into textual and content n-grams. The article also presents the frequent chunks which serve as starting points in bringing up different aspects of research reports. The practical value of the results is briefly discussed at the end of the article.