Examining the Structure of Three- and Four-Word Lexical Bundles in Articles Published by European Journal of Pharmacology

Examining the Structure of Three- and Four-Word Lexical Bundles in Articles Published by European Journal of Pharmacology

The world-wide popularity of English in academic setting has intensified the importance of lexical bundles for those scholars who want to publish their jobs in international journals. Lexical bundles or as Gledhill (2000) calls it “phraseological accent” are recurrent word combinationsthat have important role in accepting or rejecting of an article in a particular field.Considering the role of lexical bundles as one of the most important tools for producing acceptable and fluent pieces of papers, this article inspected the structures of three- and four-word lexical bundles in different sections of abstract, introduction, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion of 100 pharmacology research articles published in European Journal of Pharmacology, a peer reviewed scientific journal in the field of pharmacology which publishes full-length articles related to different issues in pharmacology.The method of the study was descriptive.The corpus was analyzed using a free ware concordance program named AntConc3.4.4 andBiber et al.’s (1999) structural classifications of lexical bundles was utilized for identifying the structure of lexical bundles.The findings of the study showed that noun-phrasesand passive verb+ prepositional phrase fragmentswerecommon three-word lexical bundles as well as noun-phrasesand prepositional phrases were the most frequent four-word lexical bundlesin the articles published in European Journal of Pharmacology.

The world-wide popularity of English in academic setting has intensified the importance of lexical bundles for those scholars who want to publish their jobs in international journals. Lexical bundles or as Gledhill (2000) calls it “phraseological accent” are recurrent word combinationsthat have important role in accepting or rejecting of an article in a particular field.Considering the role of lexical bundles as one of the most important tools for producing acceptable and fluent pieces of papers, this article inspected the structures of three- and four-word lexical bundles in different sections of abstract, introduction, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion of 100 pharmacology research articles published in European Journal of Pharmacology, a peer reviewed scientific journal in the field of pharmacology which publishes full-length articles related to different issues in pharmacology.The method of the study was descriptive.The corpus was analyzed using a free ware concordance program named AntConc3.4.4 andBiber et al.’s (1999) structural classifications of lexical bundles was utilized for identifying the structure of lexical bundles.The findings of the study showed that noun-phrasesand passive verb+ prepositional phrase fragmentswerecommon three-word lexical bundles as well as noun-phrasesand prepositional phrases were the most frequent four-word lexical bundlesin the articles published in European Journal of Pharmacology.