Connecting lexical bundles and moves in Introductions in medical research articles

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine the use of lexical bundles in three rhetorical moves in Introduction sections of medical research articles and to investigate the relations between lexical bundles and moves. A corpus-driven approach was used to identify commonly occurring four-word lexical bundles. The extracted bundles were manually classified into structural and functional categories, and their possible connections with rhetorical moves were explored. The study had the following findings. First, structurally, Introduction sections of MRAs were characterised by a predominance of phrasal bundles in terms of both types and tokens. Second, functionally, text-oriented bundles were found to be the most frequent while participant-oriented bundles the least frequent, with research-oriented bundles in between. Third, the analysis of bundle-move connections identified more cross-move bundles than move-specific bundles. Most of the move-specific bundles were clausal in Move 2 but phrasal in Move 3. All the move-specific bundles were research-oriented bundles in Move 1 and Move 3 but text-oriented in Move 2. The variations could be attributed to the communicative functions of moves. The findings suggest the close relations between lexical bundle use and rhetorical functions of each move.