A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF PREFABRICATED STRUCTURES IN PAKISTANI RESEARCH ABSTRACTS

Authors

  • Sabrina Malik University of Management and Technology, Sialkot
  • Gulfam Hussain Air University, Islamabad Pakistan
  • Benazir Karakorum International University, Gilgit-Baltistan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.52567/pjsr.v4i04.891

Abstract

Prefabricated structures referred to as poly-word strings or lexical bundles are recognized as the fundamental building blocks in academic discourse. They build fluency in academic discourse, helping to shape coherence and meaning in a speech or text. For decades, lexical bundles have captivated a considerable amount of attention in corpus-based research in English for Academic Purposes. However, in the Pakistani context, less research has been carried out to explore lexical bundles in academic discourse. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine prefabricated structures employed in the scientific research abstracts of theses and articles from social and physical sciences. A specialized corpus was built from the 1200 research abstracts from social and physical sciences. AntConc software was utilized for the extraction of lexical bundles. Biber structural model of lexical bundles was employed as a theoretical framework. The study found 42 four-word lexical bundle types and 659 tokens in soft sciences. On the other side, the study found 55 four-word lexical bundle types and 950 tokens in physical sciences. Besides, this corpus-based study found 11 common core four-word lexical bundles in social and physical sciences. Moreover, the present study also contributed some new structures to the respective structural model of lexical bundles. If Pakistani science scholars are introduced with these lists of lexical bundles obtained from this study, their rhetorical practice of writing research abstracts can be significantly improved. The results yielded from this study can be substantially used for ESP and EAP further to enhance the academic discourse of the research scholars.      

Keywords: Corpus-based study, lexical bundles; physical sciences; research abstracts; social sciences.

Author Biographies

  • Sabrina Malik, University of Management and Technology, Sialkot

    MPhil Applied Linguistics

  • Gulfam Hussain, Air University, Islamabad Pakistan

    Ph.D. Linguistics Research Scholar

  • Benazir, Karakorum International University, Gilgit-Baltistan

     

     

     

Additional Files

Published

2022-12-31

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 04 (2022): Pakistan Journal of Social Research PJSR

Section

Research Article

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Sabrina Malik, Gulfam Hussain, Benazir

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

How to Cite

[1]
“A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF PREFABRICATED STRUCTURES IN PAKISTANI RESEARCH ABSTRACTS”, Pak. J, Soc. Sci., vol. 4, no. 04, pp. 773–785, Dec. 2022, doi: 10.52567/pjsr.v4i04.891.