Towards a Refined Inventory of Lexical Bundles: an Experiment in the Formulex Method
Towards a Refined Inventory of Lexical Bundles: an Experiment in the Formulex Method

Summary/Abstract: A number of corpus studies focusing on the description of the use and functions of lexical bundles have been conducted recently in order to explore the phraseology of learner language. As with any studies of lexical bundles, the problem of overlapping or structurally incomplete items poses a particular challenge. In practice, it is often difficult to align such units with specific discourse functions. The fact that lexical bundles do not constitute neat form-and-meaning mappings results from, among other reasons, their being grounded in language use rather than language system. In this pilot study we attempt to test a new method called Formulex (Forsyth, 2015a; 2015b) to verify whether an application of the criterion of coverage – in addition to the conventional criteria of orthographic length, minimum frequency and distribution range (Biber et al., 1999) – may help obtain a more refined inventory of lexical bundles and hence facilitate further qualitative analyses. To that end, we use Polish and Lithuanian components of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE, Granger et al., 2009), as well as the LOCNESS corpus (CECL), representing academic essays written by British and American students. The results revealed that many lexical bundles of fixed length identified in a conventional way are fragments of longer chunks of text and hence they should not be treated as complete or standalone 4-word lexical items. It was also revealed that the application of the Formulex method, where the word sequences are mutually exclusive, helps a researcher filter out overlapping or non-perceptually salient lexical bundles and, ultimately, specify more precise boundaries of lexical bundles of fixed length.

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