An Inventory of Core and Peripheral Lexical Bundles in English Research Articles: A Cross-disciplinary Corpus-based Study

Lexical bundles are extended collocations which appear more frequently than expected by chance, helping to shape meanings in specific contexts and contributing to our sense of coherence in a text (Hyland, 2012). This study aimed to explore the core and peripheral lexical bundles in English research articles. To extract the core bundles, the study used a 6-million-word corpus of research articles from 15 disciplines representing three main disciplinary areas, namely, sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Three to five-word bundles were extracted using Antconc (Anthony, 2014). After the application of the exclusion criteria, a total of 6378 lexical bundles of varying lengths were identified. Of the 6378 bundles, 696 bundles were found to be common (i.e. core bundles) across the three disciplinary areas which amounts to 32% of the total bundles. The list of core bundles is largely composed of three-word strings, which account for 86% of the total. They are followed by four-word bundles and five word bundles, which equal 11.63% and 2.15 % of the core bundles respectively. The findings also revealed that there is 28.94% overlap between the core bundles and the list of extracted bundles from applied linguistics corpus. Overlap bundles (i.e., common items between the core and those in applied linguistics) and peripheral bundles (i.e., items in applied linguistics only) were also classified quantitatively according to their functions using Hyland s (2008) functional taxonomy and in terms of their structure using Biber’s (1999) taxonomy in order to facilitate their inclusion in writing instructions. Findings justify the utility of identifying lexical sequences that transcend disciplinary boundaries as well as a strictly discipline-specific approach in the study of lexical bundles.