Lexical bundles in academic articles from arts disciplines

Abstract

This paper studies lexical bundles in academic articles in the fields of photography, product/industrial design and audiovisual arts disciplines. The comparative corpus study presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of formal and functional types of 4-grams used in published articles by expert authors in the three arts disciplines. The analysis was based on Biber et al.’s (1999) formal taxonomy and Hyland’s (2008a, 2008b) functional taxonomy of lexical bundles. The results show that both photography and audiovisual arts disciplines have similar utilisation of formal and functional types of bundles, prioritising content-oriented rhetorical functions. However, the discipline of product/industrial design shows a stronger preference for participant-oriented functions that utilise a distancing, hedging type of bundle. The findings help teachers of academic writing to identify the objective language needs of PhD students for writing in these disciplines. Writing instruction can be more precise with respect to disciplinary conventions in the creative arts disciplines. These disciplines have been overlooked in most of the English for Specific Academic Purposes teaching materials.