Structures and Functions of Lexical Bundles in the Discussion Section of Research Articles: An Interdisciplinary Study

Many studies have focused on lexical bundles, examining the generic profile of research article (RA), the most important scholastic genre for knowledge production and dissemination. However, lexical bundles have not been thoroughly investigated in different academic disciplines comparatively while disciplinary features do impact the genre in a variety of ways. This study, therefore, aimed to examine structures and functions of lexical bundles in the discussion of RAs, one of the most significant academic part-genres. To this end, 50 English RAs of applied linguistics and 50 RAs of geology published from 2017 to 2022 were selected from several peer-reviewed journals of the fields as the corpus. The RAs, representing soft and hard disciplines, were analyzed based on Biber et al. (1999, 2004)’s models of lexical bundles using AntConc software. The results revealed that the most frequent lexical bundles in both disciplines were phrasal (passive and prepositional phrases) and of referential function. It was also found that there are marked similarities between the two subcorpora regarding the structural and functional categories of lexical bundles. The findings promise implications for discourse analysis and the field of English for Academic Purposes in relation to syllabus design and materials development for academic reading and writing.