Lexical Bundles in EAP Research Articles of L1 and L2 English Authors: A Contrastive Analysis

Academic research writing has witnessed an upsurge of interest in the investigation of recurrent word combinations which serve a variety of pragmatic purposes and can differentiate novice authors from professional ones. Reviewing the literature indicates that few studies have investigated lexical bundles such as on the other hand, as a result of, etc. in economic research articles by L1 and L2 authors. Thus, this study intended to investigate the structure, function, and semantic preference of most frequent 4-word lexical bundles in economic research articles written by L1 and L2 authors. The corpora were analyzed and intended lexical bundles were recognized employing a concordance tool, Antconc 3.5.9.0, to identify lexical bundles. The result of this study illustrated that L1 and L2 authors used prepositional phrase bundles more frequently than verb phrase and dependent clause bundles. The results also suggested that L2 authors' limited implementation of lexical bundles might be rooted in their culture, writing rules, and psychological features. In terms of semantic preference, both L1 and L2 authors used lexical bundles with almost the same semantic prosody in the field of economy. Teachers and learners in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) could benefit from the findings of this research to appreciate the role of lexical bundles better.