Lexical bundles and discourse signalling in academic lectures

Hilary Nesi | Coventry University

Helen Basturkmen | University of Auckland

This paper discusses some approaches to the categorisation of cohesive devices with reference to spoken academic discourse, multi-word units, and strings of frequently co-occurring words (lexical bundles). It goes on to investigate the cohesive role of lexical bundles in a corpus of 160 university lectures (120 from the BASE corpus and 40 from MICASE). Like the bundles from the T2K SWAL teaching subcorpus, investigated by Biber, Conrad and Cortes (2004), the bundles in the lecture corpus included both ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ elements. The majority of frequently occurring bundles were found to be used to signal discourse relations, although their cohesive function was not necessarily obvious when listed out of context.

Keywords: academic discourse, BASE, cohesion, corpora, lectures, lexical bundles, linking ideas, MICASE

Published online: 14 January 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.17.03nes

Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Baumgarten, Nicole

2016. L2 English Academic Speaking Development: Insights from a Multilingual University Context. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 232 ► pp. 145 ff.

Chang, Miao-Hsia & Shu-Kai Hsieh

2017. A corpus-based study of the recurrent lexical bundle ka li kong ‘let (me) tell you’ in Taiwanese Southern Min conversations. Chinese Language and Discourse. An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 8:2 ► pp. 174 ff.

Dontcheva-Navratilova, Olga

2012. Lexical Bundles in Academic Texts by Non-native Speakers. Brno Studies in English 38:2 ► pp. 37 ff.

Huang, Zeping & Gavin Bui

2019. Lexical bundles in conversation across Englishes. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 40:3 ► pp. 299 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 february 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.