Exploring the Lexical Bundles Realizing Rhetorical Moves of Research Article Abstracts

Research in phraseological units has significantly improved the understanding of academic discourse. One of the important phraseological units is lexical bundles. This study presents the five-word lexical bundles identified in the abstracts of research article abstracts of linguistics and language studies. For this, a one-million-word specialized corpus was compiled from research article abstracts published in impact factor journals from 2018 to 2023.  The lexical bundles identified in it were analyzed to examine the relationship between the bundles and the rhetorical moves of abstracts. A corpus-driven method was used to extract the bundles. The findings of the study revealed that lexical bundles are move-sensitive. Some moves have a higher number of bundles used in them. While others show a few five-word bundles showing the connection with the moves. Based on the findings, it is suggested that future research may be conducted to understand the various moves in the use of these bundles in abstracts.