Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1Background of the Study
近年来，人们越来越大的兴趣，英语与外国学者交流最新成果的机会有限，由于中国学者的科研文章面对面。一方面，中国学者需要阅读的文章来自其他国家的时间，以获得先进的科研。另一方面，他们需要写英文研究文章，阐述自己的学术观点和研究成果，向世界各地的人们的目标。对于中国学者撰写的研究论文是一个更具挑战性的旅程，因为建立在外国语言文本传达一个人的想法，需要特别关注和努力。它的情况并不少见，他们发现，有时写英语，就可以理解和接受的母语学者在同一领域的科研文章更是难以不是去做研究。写作的问题主要体现亏缺的准确的话，使用不同的词汇表达上的弱点。其结果是，分析研究文章中的词汇一直是许多研究的目的。此外，岳和沃伦（29-62）在一项研究报告，各类公式化序列被发现构成话语的58.6％和52.3％的调查的书面话语。因此，越来越多的研究集中于多字的表达式进行。所有这些研究表明，经常性的表达适当使用母语一样的创作，使他们的作品容易被人接受，可以促进第二语言学习者和母语国家之间的学术交流，因为他们知道词组的确切含义，可以经常使用它们。阿尔滕贝格（99-122）被认为是第一研究人员采用基于经验的方法研究经常单词组合之一。 Biber有等人对他的工作，绘图。 （990）进行的研究，它被定义为朗文英语口语和书面语法词汇束经常单词组合。一个伟大的一些研究词汇束疑问和进行生产值得注意的突出业绩的语言从不同的方面在不同的英语寄存器。两种常见的结论郑成功来自这些研究在学术写作中的词汇捆绑。一种是，广泛利用词汇束可以帮助作家自然语言。另一种是词汇捆绑达芙不同的寄存器。Recent years have seen growing interest in English scientific research articles among Chinesescholars due to the limited opportunities of communicating latest achievements with foreignscholars face to face. On the one hand, Chinese scholars need to read the articles to get theadvanced scientific research from other countries on time. They, on the other hand, arerequired to write English research articles with the aims of elaborating their academic point ofview and showing the research achievements to the people around the world. For Chinesescholars, writing research papers is a more challenging journey since creating texts to conveyone’s ideas in a foreign language requires special attention and effort. It is not uncommon forthem to find that sometimes writing an English scientific research article which can beunderstood and accepted by the native-speaker scholars in the same field is even moredifficult than doing research. The writing problems are mainly reflected on the weakness inthe use of accurate words and various vocabulary expressions. As a result, analyzingvocabulary in research articles has been the purpose of many studies. Moreover, Erman andWarren (29-62) reported in one study that various types of formulaic sequences were found toconstitute 58.6% of the spoken discourse and 52.3% of the written discourse investigated.Therefore, an increasing number of studies focusing on multi-word expressions have beenconducted. All these studies suggest that appropriate use of the recurrent expressions canfacilitate the academic communication between the second language learners and nativespeakers by producing native-like creations, making their writings easy to be accepted because they know the exact meaning of the phrases and can routinely use them. Altenberg(99-122) is considered to be one of the first researchers to study recurrent word combinationsusing empirical-based methods. Drawing on his work, Biber et al. (990) have conducted thestudy of recurrent word combinations which is defined as lexical bundles in the LongmanGrammar of Spoken and Written English. A great number of studies on lexical bundles havebeen conducted and produced noteworthy and prominent results looking from differentaspects of the language within different English registers. Two common conclusions havebeen drawn from these studies on lexical bundles in academic writing. One is that a wide useof lexical bundles can help the writer natural language. The other is that lexical bundles differin different registers.
1.2Purpose of the Study
这项研究已进行调查由中国学者使用的词汇捆绑年英语发表科研文章。这项研究的最终目的是要找出3-6确定学习者的著作的话束的分布，并探讨4词汇束，在英语出版由中国学者撰写的科研文章的结构和功能的使用。诚如由扎迈勒，研究话语都有其自己的特点“，因为它似乎需要一种语言与自己的词汇，规范，公约集，查询模式”（187）。因此，在整个语言的研究，有许多大型的调查，侧重于寻找这些特点的研究文章。沉恒（1-5）学习英语的主要特点，从词法，句法和修辞的角度对科学和技术。研究文章的词汇是一个引人注目的特点，在语言学，词汇的研究转移，从单一的词汇字多字的表达近年来已引起了极大的兴趣。然而，这些研究主要集中在词汇捆绑使用在英语母语写的研究文章中，很少有人知道非英语为母语的英语研究文章使用的词汇捆绑。因此，调查，以英语发表的研究由中国学者撰写的文章中使用的词汇束的研究成为推动。This study has been conducted to investigate the use of lexical bundles by Chinese scholars inthe published English scientific research articles. The ultimate purpose of the study is to findout the distribution of the 3-6 words bundles identified in the learners’ writings and explorethe structural and functional use of 4-lexical bundles in published English scientific researcharticles written by Chinese scholars.As stated by Zamel, research discourse has its own distinguishing features “because it appearsto require a kind of language with its own vocabulary, norms, sets of conventions, and modesof inquiry” (187). Therefore, throughout of the language studies, there have manyinvestigations that focus on finding these distinguishing features of research articles. Shen Heng (1-5) studied the main features of English for science and technology from the lexical,syntax and rhetoric perspectives. The vocabulary of research articles is one of the features thatattracted attention, and the studies of vocabulary which shifts from single lexical word tomulti-word expressions in recent years have aroused great interests among linguistics.However, these studies mainly focused on the use of lexical bundles in research articleswritten by English native speakers, little is known about the use of lexical bundles bynon-native English speakers in their English research articles. Therefore, the investigation tothe use of lexical bundles in published English research articles written by Chinese scholarsbecomes the impetus of the study.
5Chapter 2 Literature Review
This chapter provides the literature review of lexical bundles for the present study bypresenting three sections. The first section introduces the definition of lexical bundles used byscholars from different perspectives. Classifications of lexical bundles with specific examplesare provided in section two. Section three presents a detailed review on the recent studies oflexical bundles in academic discourse which are closely related to the present study.
2.1 Definition of Lexical Bundles
In recent years, an increasing number of studies have made use of corpus to analyze themultiword units in language. Altenberg (99-102) reported in his exploration of theLondon-Lund Corpus that about 80% of the words in the corpus formed part of recurrentword combinations. However, as Wray stated that there was a “problem of terminology”(Formulaic language and the Lexicon 9) when describing these word combinations. Fromvery beginning, the terms used in the studies considerably vary from scholar to scholar. Wraysummarized the terms which can be found in the literature to describe lexical sequences asTable 1.
From the definition given by DeCarrico and Nattinger, it is not difficult to notice that theyregarded the lexical phrases as the phenomenon which neither belongs to lexicon nor syntax.In addition, each of them is related to a particular discourse function, such as expressing time,three days ago, or suggesting relationships among ideas, the more X, the more Y. Furthermore,the meaning of one lexical phrase does not depend on the total meanings of words thatconstruct the phrase, such as kick the bucket.
Chapter 3 Methodology......... 32-40
3.1 Research Questions.........32-33
3.2 Corpora Used in the Study.........33-35
3.3 Criteria for the Identification .........35-36
3.4 Analysis Instrument......... 36-38
3.5 Data Analysis Framework .........38-40
Chapter 4 Results and Discussion......... 40-73
4.1 Distribution of the Lexical Bundles......... 40-48
4.1.1 Distribution of the Lexical Bundles .........40-44
4.1.2 Distributional Comparison between .........44-48
4.2. The Structural Analysis of 4-word Bundles......... 48-58
4.3 Functional Analysis of 4-word Bundles .........58-69
4.4 The Relationship between Structural.........69-73
Conclusion
The main objective of this study is to explore the use of lexical bundles in the scientificresearch articles written by Chinese scholars in English and to compare the use of lexicalbundles with native-speaker scholars. Two corpora of published articles on chemistry, physics,biology and computer by Chinese scholars and native-speaker scholars respectively arecollected for the present study. With the help of corpus tool AntConc 3.2.3, the study analyzesthe frequency distribution of the 3-6 word bundles, structure and function of 4-word lexicalbundles and compared with those used by the native-speaker scholars. The major findings ofthis study are concluded as follows:
In the first place, although the overall distributions of 3-6 words lexical bundles in the twocorpora are similar to each other, the language used in scientific research articles produced bynative-speaker scholars is more varied than those written by Chinese scholars due to theheavy overlapping bundles in the latter corpus. In both corpora, the 3-word bundles are themost common and the types and frequency of the lexical bundles become low with theincrease of the length. Next, according to the findings of the structural analysis, it can befound that Chinese scholars have used ninety-six frequent 4-word bundles, covering all themajor structural classifications proposed by Biber et al. Despite the surprisingly similarnumber of frequently used 4-word bundles found in native research articles, the CSC containsmany more lexical VP-based bundles (52.1%) than NSSC does (23.0%), which can be regarded as a sign of immature writing. On the other hand, native-speaker scholars employ amuch wider range of NP-based bundles (41.4%) particularly those with of than Chinesescholars (14.6%). A possible reason for the overuse of VP-based bundles and underuse ofNP-based bundles by Chinese scholars might be that Chinese scholars are not quite capable ofadopting nominalization, an important characteristic of English scientific research articles,which changes verbs into a corresponding noun so as to help the writers convey informationobjectively or describe the research specifically. Another reason is that Chinese scholars areunder the influence of Chinese language, in which verb phrases are much more frequentlyused than noun phrases. Thirdly, based on Hyland’s classification, 39.6% of the 4-wordbundles belong to research-oriented bundles, 43.8% are text-oriented bundles and 8.3% areparticipant-oriented bundles in CSC. As shown in Table 4.2.2, Chinese and native-speakerscholars have used similar proportion of text-oriented bundles in their English scientificresearch articles. However, the writings produced by native-speaker scholars display a greaterproportion of research-oriented bundles than that of Chinese scholars. Moreover, the findingsshow Chinese scholars tend to use a larger stock of participant-oriented bundles than thenative-speaker scholars do, which reveal that Chinese scholars have the stronger need toshorten the distance with the reader. Lastly, the relationship between structural and functionalclassifications shows that the most common lexical bundles within a structural category aresuggestive for a certain function. For example, NP-based bundles usually perform theresearch-oriented function, while the lexical bundles incorporating verb phrase are stronglybound to the text-oriented or participant-oriented functions.
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