Stance lexical bundles in academic L2 writing: A contrastive interlanguage analysis

Corpus linguistics is 'a linguistics methodology which is founded on the use of electronic collections of naturally occurring texts, viz. corpora' (Granger, 2002, p.4). In the last five decades, with the acceleration in the development of computer technology in terms of processing speed and storage capacity of electronic data, and the structured compilation of written or transcribed speech texts, corpus linguistics (CL) has undergone a remarkable revival. As Gries (2009) states, CL is one of the fastest-growing methodologies in linguistics, which is also a lively and increasingly multilingual subject (McEnery& Wilson, 2001). McEnery and Wilson (2001) define CL as the study of language based on examples of 'real life' language use. Corpus linguistics is used in many areas, such as speech research, grammar, applied linguistics, culture, sociolinguistics, semantics and lexical studies. Lexical studies help producing and revising dictionaries much more quickly than before by providing more up-to-date information about the language. Linguists have been interested in the sequences of words that tend to occur for a long time (Strunkyte&Jurkunaite, 2008). The present study examines a particular type of recurrent chunks: lexical bundles. Lexical bundles are multi-word expressions referred to as "clusters" or "chunks" and an important component of the fluent linguistic production depends on the control of them (Hyland, 2008a). This study aimed at finding out the most common stance lexical bundles used in argumentative essays written by native English speakers and Turkish and Japanese EFL learners. It also aimed to find the structural and functional characteristics of these bundles, and to find out how similar these structures are used by the native speakers and EFL learners. The results showed that native speakers use lexical bundles least. Japanese EFL use these chunks most frequently. The functions and the structures of lexical bundles vary in each group.