چکیده:
This study was an attempt to shed light on the formulaic nature of the language of theoretical review articles. The study was based on a corpus of 517 English review articles from linguistics and applied linguistics disciplines. Following a corpus-driven discourse analytic approach, we identified four-word bundles occurring at least 20 times per million words in at least five different articles and investigated their structural and functional features. The results showed that the dominance of text-oriented and phrasal bundles, especially framing signals and prepositional phrases, indicates the highly informational nature of review articles in linguistics and applied linguistics and the importance of organizational features of discourse in articles. Moreover, the low proportion of participant-oriented bundles and resultative signals implies the writer’s avoidance to make claims and interpretations in English review articles. Additionally, the varied and frequent use of the anticipatory-it structure among clausal bundles, the low proportion of engagement bundles, and the fact that this dialogic feature of article writing was conveyed through an impersonal construction point to the writer’s reluctance to explicitly show commitment to his/her evaluations. Finally, expressing stance through anticipatory-it constructions and shell nouns indicates the writer’s intention to hide or foreground authorial observations, interpretations, and claims.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The results showed that the dominance of text- oriented and phrasal bundles, especially framing signals and prepositional phrases, indicates the highly informational nature of review articles in linguistics and applied linguistics and the importance of organizational features of discourse in articles.
Given the clear distinction between research papers and review articles, and the fact that no prior study has lent itself to an / the investigation of lexical bundles in English review articles, it is necessary to shed light on the formulaic nature of the language of this highly neglected written academic genre.
To this end, this study was aimed to identify an empirically derived list of lexical bundles, commonly used in English linguistics and applied linguistics review articles, and investigate their structural and functional features.
Moreover, the highly frequent and varied nature of text-oriented bundles in English review articles is related to the fact that published articles deal more with knowledge making and disseminating as a norm developing genre (Swales, 1990) than with the display and assessment of students’ subject knowledge of the field as a norm developed pedagogic genre (Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2008b).
The low proportion of participant-oriented bundles in English review articles in both variety and overall frequency lends support to the findings of Jalali and Zare (2016), and Hyland (2008b) for research articles, PhD dissertations, master’s theses, and academic discourse overall.