Diachronic change in lexical bundles in research article abstracts of applied linguistics

Abstract

As discourse building blocks, lexical bundles have received abundant attention from applied linguists and corpus linguists in the past decades. However, little research has examined the dynamic change in the use of lexical bundles in academic writing, not to mention in the part-genre of research article (RA) abstracts. In response to this gap, this study depicted the diachronic change in lexical bundle use in RA abstracts in terms of their structure and function through the analysis of 3 008 abstracts published in authoritative international applied linguistics journals from 1990 to 2019. The results reveal a declining and more homogeneous use of four-word bundles. Preposition- phrase-, noun-phrase-, and clause-based fragments have been the dominant structures, but have presented differential diachronic changes. Functionally, research- and text-oriented bundles have been the predominant categories, but have shown opposite evolutionary trajectories, with the former increasing and the latter decreasing. These findings provide evidence for the variant and dynamic features as well as the generic specificity of lexical bundles in academic writing and have implications for academic writing and EAP teaching practice.