Phraseological Patterns in Spoken Academic Genres: A Corpus Analysis of TED Talks

The purpose of the present study was to identify the top 3- to 6-word lexical bundles most frequently used in a corpus of Technology, Entertainment, and Design Conference (TED) talks and to discuss how they behave structurally and functionally. To this end, a selected corpus of TED talks was analyzed via Anthony’s AntConc, Version 3.5.7. After setting frequency threshold, 874 lexical bundles were identified in a 6,151,569 million-word corpus of TED video transcription, with a lot of, thank you very much, I’m going to show you and at the end of the day as the most occurring lexical bundles in 3-to 6-word bundles, respectively. Next, the identified lexical bundles were analyzed structurally based on their grammatical forms and then functionally based on their contextual meanings. Structural analysis revealed that TED lecturers used noun phrases and prepositional phrases more than other structures in their speeches; functional analysis showed that lecturers tend to use stance expressions and discourse organizers bundles more than other functions. The findings of the study focus on the importance of lexical bundles to language learners, language teachers, and materials developers.