Structural and functional analysis of lexical bundles in medical research articles: A corpus-based study

As a member of larger family of formulaic sequences,lexical bundles play different discourse functions in written research articles. This study investigated the use of four-word lexical bundles in published research articles in medicine via natural language processing by computational linguistics. A corpus of 2,420,914 words was extracted from 790 research articles in 33 medical disciplines. For the identification of lexical bundles,a number of computer software products such as ABBYY FineReader 10 professional edition,Total assistant,Antconc 3.2.3,and WordSmith Tools 5 were used. The identified lexical bundles were classified structurally and functionally based on the taxonomies in the literature. The results of the study showed that 102 identified lexical bundles differ structurally and functionally and most of the writers of medical research articles rely on text-oriented bundles for establishing their written academic discourse. This study provided new insights in understanding the discipline-specific discourse of medical research articles and in doing further corpus-based research in written academic discourse and EAP. This research introduced stylistic linguistics point of view in information retrieval systems development.