On Lexical Bundles in Polish Patient Information Leaflets: A Corpus-Driven Study
On Lexical Bundles in Polish Patient Information Leaflets: A Corpus-Driven Study

Summary/Abstract: So far little attention has been paid to the corpus analysis of recurrent phraseologies found in Polish texts, in particular texts representing specialists registers of language use. Also, one may note the lack of corpus linguistic studies of lexical bundles (Biber et al. 1999) found in texts originally written in Polish. Conducted from a register perspective (Biber and Conrad 2009), this descriptive and exploratory study is intended as a first step towards a comprehensive corpus-driven description of the use and functions of the most frequent lexical bundles found in patient information leaflets (PILs), one of the most commonly used text types in the healthcare sector in Poland. The research material includes 100 PILs written originally in Polish, extracted from internet websites of ten pharmaceutical companies operating on the Polish market, compiled in a purpose-designed corpus of circa 197,000 words. Based largely on the methodology proposed by Biber, Conrad and Cortes (2003, 2004), Biber (2006), and Goźdź-Roszkowski (2011), which makes possible an analysis of the use and discourse functions of lexical bundles, the present study is primarily meant to provide methodological guidelines for future research on lexical bundles in Polish texts. This appears to be important since so far lexical bundles have been studied predominantly in texts originally written in English. The results of this preliminary research reveal salient links between the frequent occurrence of lexical bundles on the one hand, and situational and functional characteristics of the text variety under scrutiny on the other.

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