A Comparative Corpus-driven Study of Lexical Bundles in Applied Linguistics Research Articles between Native (English) and Non-native (Iranian) Authors

This study examined the use of structures and functions of lexical bundles in scientific research articles written by native English writers and non-native English writers. To this end, three-, four--, and five-word lexical bundles were contrastively investigated in the corpora, which contained 954,615 words. The RAs were then examined structurally by Biber et al. (1999) and functionally by Hyland’s model (2008). Based on the results, native authors used more lexical bundles regarding structural classification than non-native authors. Furthermore, based on the detailed analysis, the authors, no difference in whether they were native or non-native, used noun phrases with of-phrase fragments with high frequency and high rate. Regarding LBs’ functions, the results indicated that the highest concentration of native and non-native corpus is on research-oriented bundles. In general, there was no significant difference in the frequency of using lexical bundles in terms of functional classification between native and non-native researchers of soft science. Regarding LBs’ functions, the highest concentration of native and non-native corpus is on text-oriented bundles.