Structural and Functional Analysis of Lexical Bundles in Music Research Articles : A Corpus-Based Approach

Sammanfattning: Applied linguistics has lately been seen in studies of formulaicity of language operating through recurrent word combinations. The present study deals with one type of word combinations, namely lexical bundles (LBs), which are defined as a sequence of three or more words that frequently co-occur in a particular register (Biber et al., 1999). The present study is a corpus-based analysis of four-word lexical bundles extracted from Music research articles (RAs). The Corpus of Music Research Articles (CMRA) of one million words was created in order to perform structural classification of the retrieved lexical bundles and an analysis of their functions. The CMRA includes 110 articles collected from international music journals from various music subdisciplines. In order to find which lexical bundles were characteristic of music research specifically, the findings were compared to previous research based on other academic disciplines. The list of 218 lexical bundles was compared to the one of three different subject areas (Jalilifar et al., 2016) with the purpose of identification of discipline-specific LBs (n=102) which included 20 topic-specific bundles; and general lexical bundles (n=116) which included 56 core bundles shared among Music and three subject areas (Art and Humanities, Sciences and Social sciences). Structurally and functionally, the analysis of the extracted lexical bundles demonstrated that native English expert writers predominantly used preposition-based phrases (50%), with respect to structure; and research-oriented bundles (74%), with respect to function. The findings have pedagogical applications and could be used in courses in English for Specific Purposes.