August 2011 Volume 7 Issue 3
Autumn Edition
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Title
Corpus Study of Lexical Bundles: Journalistic Discourse in Focus

Authors
Hossein Vahid Dastjerdi and Marzieh Rafiee
University of Isfahan

Biodata
Hossein Vahid Dastjerdi teaches in the English Language Department at the University of Isfahan, Iran. He is associate professor of applied linguistics and has taught courses of variegated character, including translation courses, for years. He has been a fellow of the English Centers at the universities of Isfahan and Shiraz where he has investigated into issues related to materials preparation for GE. and ESP. courses. He is the author of a number of books in this respect. He has also published a good number of articles on discourse, testing and translation in local and international journals. Dr. Vahid’s current research interests include testing, materials development, translation, the metaphoricity of language, discourse analysis, pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. He is presently involved in a number of projects concerning translation studies as well as figurative language use.

Marzieh Rafiee (b. 1987, Isfahan, Iran) is an M.A. graduate student at the University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran. She received her M.A. in TEFL at the University of Isfahan (2010) following the completion of her B.A. in English Literature from University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran (2008). Her main research areas of interest are: Language Teaching Methodology, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics and Translation. She has been working as an EFL instructor since 2005.

Abstract
One of the prerequisites of fluent language is the use of fixed or standard forms of expression. During the last century, the study of these building blocks has attracted the attention of many linguists and researchers. One of the terms assigned to these frequently used expressions is lexical bundles. This paper aims to investigate the use of lexical bundles in newspapers. It aims to shed more light on the frequency of occurrence and distribution of functional and structural types of lexical bundles and their probable relations as used by Iranian journalists. For this purpose, 680 pages of the newspaper Iran Daily were selected to form a corpus. Lexical bundles were identified with the use of a computer program, and then their structures and functions were described. The findings reveal that lexical bundles employed in journalistic materials are mostly used in the same way as academic writing in terms of structural distribution. As regards their functional types, the study shows that in this register, referential bundles occur more frequently than the other two groups of bundles, namely discourse organizers and stance bundles.

Keywords: lexical bundles, journalistic discourse, newspaper text types, referential bundles