Lexical bundles as an intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary mark: A corpus-based study of research articles from business, biology, and applied linguistics

Abstract

This study seeks to explore with a lexical-bundle approach the intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary variations between disciplines. It investigates the structural and functional features of lexical bundles in research articles from two business-type disciplines, finance and accounting, and those from two contrastive disciplines, biology and applied linguistics. The results suggest that, between the two business disciplines, while the bundle usages reveal similar intradisciplinary features (e.g. similar distribution of NP-based bundles and research-oriented bundles which are associated with “statistics”), they also indicate distinctive intradisciplinary features (e.g. ‘accounting’ articles contain a larger number of diversified clausal bundles and “resultative” bundles). In addition, the results show that lexical bundles can also act as an interdisciplinary mark. For instance, the significantly larger proportion of bundles in ‘business’ articles, compared to those in ‘biology’ or ‘applied linguistics’ articles, reveals its strong phraseological behaviour. These findings further support the positive role of lexical bundles in the understandings of disciplinary features.