Lexical bundles in academic lectures

Lexical Bundles in Academic Lectures (BA thesis abstract by Marek Leško) The work attempts to briefly outline the current state of knowledge on the subject of lexical bundles and investigate their functions and use in two sets of academic lectures, British and American. For this purpose, it uses lecture transcripts from BASE (British Academic Spoken English) and MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) corpora. In the theoretical part, lexical bundles are defined as recurrent expressions of three and more words that are identified by statistical means (at least 20 occurrences per million words, for instance) only with no regard for structural completeness or perceptual salience. The work presents general characteristics of lexical bundles as typically non-idiomatic, structurally incomplete units and sorts them into several structural categories typical of conversation or academic prose. Three main functions of lexical bundles are identified: stance expressions, discourse organizers and references. Finally, the study discusses lexical bundles in terms of cohesion, i.e. how these recurrent expressions are used as surface links within the discourse to signal mostly intrasentential relations that fulfill the role of linking adverbials. In the practical (research) part, the thesis presents data..