Lexical bundles in spoken academic ELF

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Wang

Abstract This corpus-based study explored the effects of two factors – genre (i.e. speech event type) and disciplinary variation – on spoken academic ELF, from the perspective of lexical bundles (i.e. recurrent word combinations). The material was drawn from a corpus of transcribed spoken academic lingua franca English (ELFA). The investigation involved a quantitative analysis of the use of four-word bundles, in terms of frequency, form, and function, across a range of genres (academic lectures and seminars) and disciplines (Medicine, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences). A qualitative analysis was also carried out to give an in-depth account of functional variations associated with one particular lexical bundle I don’t know if. The results demonstrated that genre and discipline are two important factors that cannot be ignored in understanding academic ELF communication and idiomaticity, and lexical bundles provide useful glimpses on genre and disciplinary variation that are worth following up.

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serpil Ucar

The utilization of English recurrent word combinations –lexical bundles- play a fundamental role in academic prose (Karabacak & Qin, 2013). There has been highly limited research about comparing Turkish non-native and native English writers’ use of lexical bundles in academic prose in terms of frequency, structure and functions of lexical bundles (Bal, 2010; Karabacak & Qin, 2013, Öztürk, 2014). Therefore, this current research was conducted in order to investigate the most frequently used lexical bundles in the academically published articles of Turkish non-native and native speakers of English and to investigate whether there was a significant difference between native and non-native scholars with respect to the frequency, structures and functions of English language lexical bundles. The data were collected from two corpora; 15 scientific articles of native speakers and 15 scientific articles of Turkish advanced writers. The investigation included a quantitative analysis of the use of three-word lexical bundles and a qualitative analysis of the functions and structures they serve. To be more conservative, three-word lexical bundles which occur 40 times per million words and appear in 5 different texts were described a lexical bundle in this current research. The findings revealed that Turkish non-native writers showed underuse and less variation in the use of lexical bundles in their academic prose compared to native speakers.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Byoung-Hyoun Hwang ◽  
Hugh Hoikwang Kim ◽  
Kai Wu

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-454
Author(s):  
John Van Maaren

This article introduces a recent contribution to the study of ethnicity from the social sciences that provides needed systemization to the study of Jewishness in antiquity. Current scholarship on Jewishness has no instrument by which to relate the construction of Jewish identity to macro-level societal changes. The current model, based on extensive empirical data, explains changes in the form and function of ethnicity by a cyclical model that links macro-level characteristics of the social field with individual agency in ethnic construction to produce the first comparative analytic of “how and why ethnicity matters in certain society and contexts.” The introduction presented here illustrates the various components of the model with examples from Jewish history and texts and suggests how this model might be used to better understand dynamics of identity construction and change among Jews in antiquity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-303
Author(s):  
Adi Budiwiyanto ◽  
Totok Suhardijanto

Recent studies show that lexical bundles in English are pervasively found in academic discourse. In addition, the characteristics of lexical bundles found vary and differ across registers and genres. Nevertheless, it is still interesting to carry out in languages other than English. This study aims to discover the characteristics of Indonesian lexical bundles that cover frequency, structure, and function in research articles. This study adopted a mixed-method. Identification of the lexical bundle was carried out using WordSmith 7.0 on a corpus comprising 3,125,546 words, taken from 1126 texts, and consisting of six disciplines. With a frequency threshold of 40 per million words and a minimum distribution of 5 texts, 197 lexical bundles have been obtained, consisting of three- to six-word bundles with a total occurrence of 51,813 times. In terms of structure, the incomplete structure is dominating the bundles by 78.7%, with a total frequency of occurrence 38,749 times. This research finds that the pattern of lexical bundles can be classified into five types: noun-based, prepositional-based, verb-based, adjective-based, and clause-based bundles. Lexical bundles in research articles are generally clause-based (49.2%). This indicates that Indonesian lexical bundles vary in structure. The use of clause fragments and passive verbs are the main features in this genre. In terms of the discourse function, research-oriented bundles are the functions that are commonly used, while participant-oriented bundles are the least. Each discourse function has its own structural characteristics. It is also found that one lexical bundle can have two functional categories. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of written academic discourse. From the pedagogical point of view, the findings can be used as learning material for both native and non-native speakers.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Mohammed Farghal ◽  
Mashael Al-Hamly

Modality is a semantic medium that colors the way the language user views the world around him/ her in terms of certainty, necessity and obligation; hence, it places extra effort on the translator while attempting to capture modalistic shades of meaning. The task may become more challenging when the translator is dealing with a language pair where modality is grammar-oriented in one member (English, for example) and lexis-oriented in the other (Arabic, for example). The present paper aims to investigate the rendering of speaker participation in the speech event as embodied in modality when translating English fiction into Arabic. In particular, it will examine the corpus of two sets of data involving past modality (modal + have + past participle) extracted from two English novels which will be compared with their counterparts in the Arabic translations. Four main issues will be discussed. The first is to see whether the distinction between epistemic and deontic modality is maintained in translation. The second is to check whether the translators are sensitive to the import of modality in discourse as manifested in the speaker’s attitudes toward what is happening. The third is to check whether English modalized propositions are sometimes erroneously rendered into modality-free Arabic propositions. Last, the study discusses the Arabic modality markers employed to capture past modality. Both a quantitative account (focusing on form and function) and a qualitative analysis (focusing on adequacy of translation procedures) are furnished. 


Author(s):  
Patricia G. Arscott ◽  
Gil Lee ◽  
Victor A. Bloomfield ◽  
D. Fennell Evans

STM is one of the most promising techniques available for visualizing the fine details of biomolecular structure. It has been used to map the surface topography of inorganic materials in atomic dimensions, and thus has the resolving power not only to determine the conformation of small molecules but to distinguish site-specific features within a molecule. That level of detail is of critical importance in understanding the relationship between form and function in biological systems. The size, shape, and accessibility of molecular structures can be determined much more accurately by STM than by electron microscopy since no staining, shadowing or labeling with heavy metals is required, and there is no exposure to damaging radiation by electrons. Crystallography and most other physical techniques do not give information about individual molecules.We have obtained striking images of DNA and RNA, using calf thymus DNA and two synthetic polynucleotides, poly(dG-me5dC)·poly(dG-me5dC) and poly(rA)·poly(rU).


2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Fluke ◽  
Russell J. Webster ◽  
Donald A. Saucier

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