STRUCTURE OF LEXICAL BUNDLES IN ECONOMICS RESEARCH ARTICLES

Abstract

. This paper looks into the structure of four-word lexical bundles in scientific articles in English in economics journals, written by Macedonian scholars. It adopts the lexical bundle method, which requires multi-word sequences to be identified in an electronic corpus, based on their frequency and fixedness. For the purpose of the research, a corpus of economics research articles was compiled, based on which lexical bundles were identified, and compared with bundles found in four other disciplines. The results suggest that academic writers in the discipline of economics rely on the use of lexical bundles, and share bundles found among the twenty most frequent in the academic prose. The bundles identified in published economic writing show similarity with the bundles found in applied linguistics and business studies, and differences with the ones used in biology and electrical engineering. The grammatical structure of the bundles was found to be clausal, with the majority of bundles containing noun phrases and prepositional phrases. The findings from this research have some implications for EAP curricula developers.