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Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics
Edited by Joanna Kopaczyk and Jukka Tyrkkö
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 82] 2018
► pp. 189–212

Chapter 8
Lexical bundles in Wikipedia articles and related texts

Exploring disciplinary variation

 | University of Helsinki
Wikipedia is widely used by academics and students in higher education, but research on the linguistic characteristics of this genre is scarce (Kuteeva 2016). This paper explores the usefulness of lexical bundles as an analytical tool to describe disciplinary variation within Wikipedia articles, and to contrast Wikipedia writing with two neighbouring genres, student essays and research articles. The results indicate that the occurrence of lexical bundles in Wikipedia varies between disciplines, which is in broad agreement with previous studies on other academic genres. The analysis of bundles also suggests that a credible authorial persona is less crucial to Wikipedia articles. Indicative of this is the low frequency of bundles indicating stance and engagement, which are characteristic of professional academic writing (e.g. Hyland 2008a).
Keywords: Wikipedia, disciplinary differences, academic discourse, lexical bundles
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Corpus and context
  • 4.Data preparation and analysis
  • 5.Discussion of findings
    • 5.1Frequency of bundles across genres and disciplines
    • 5.2Disciplinary variation in Wikipedia articles
    • 5.3Genre-based variation within disciplines
      • 5.3.1Economics
      • 5.3.2Medicine
      • 5.3.3Literary criticism
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.82.08hil
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