The paper compares four-word lexical bundles in novice academic texts (undergraduate theses) in the field of economics written by Czech learners of English and native speakers. Our aim is to explore whether the problem of phraseological complexity measure can be tackled by the use of the onomasiological approach.
The paper compares four-word lexical bundles in novice academic texts (undergraduate theses) in the field of economics written by Czech learners of English and native speakers. Our aim is to explore whether the problem of phraseological complexity measure can be tackled by the use of the onomasiological approach. Phraseological complexity has been described as a crucial component of the overall linguistic complexity of a text, especially when assessing complexity of advanced learners' texts (cf. Paquot 2019). The previous research has shown that L2 language users tend to use a more restricted repertoire of multi-word expressions in comparison with L1 speakers, employing the same sequences more frequently and in contexts where native speakers would favour a different expression (cf. Ädel & Erman 2012: 90; Chen & Baker 2010). In the analysis, we first retrieve four-word lexical bundles from both corpora, classify them according to their discourse function and subsequently investigate how the same function is formally realized. We focus on selected functions which are typical of academic writing, such as epistemic stance bundles (e.g. are more likely to), attitudinal stance bundles (e.g. it is important to) and inferential discourse organizers (e.g. as a result of), investigating whether the degree of diversity and sophistication of bundles with the same function can be seen as a measure of L2 complexity.
