Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
VI. International Conference on Research in Applied Linguistics, Amasya, Türkiye, 9 - 11 Mayıs 2022, ss.1-2
Regarding academic prose, each discipline of science may feature differing patterns of lexical strings performing a wide array of rhetorical functions. This ongoing study sets out for an in-depth exploration of lexical bundles in veterinary medicine academic texts, a relatively uncharted area of interest for linguistic inquiry. To this end, a corpus of approximately 10 million words is compiled out of articles published in prestigious journals in the field of veterinary medicine using AntCorGen (Anthony, 2019). N-grams were then calculated to reveal 3 to 5-word “lexical bundles” (biber et al., 2004; p. 373). A phraseological categorisation of these bundles was carried out (Morley, 2018). A number of these bundles carrying metadiscoursal value were identified and re-categorised in line with Hyland and Tse (2004) and Larsson (2017). Among these are ‘this may be,’ ‘this could be,’ and ‘appear to be’ which are explicit hedging devices as denoted by Hyland and Tse (2004, p. 169). In contrast, some others such as ‘the most likely’ and ‘relative abundance of,’ which are emphatically elusive, required a new categorisation as they help both to emphasise and hedge as discussed in Larsson (2017). The findings suggest that lexical variety in veterinary medicine texts follows a peculiar pattern bearing pedagogical implications for the teaching of academic writing to researchers in this field of hard science from a genre analysis perspective.