CHANGES IN THE USAGE OF LEXICAL BUNDLES IN THE FIELD OF EDUCATION DURING THE LAST 20 YEARS

<doi>10.24250/jpe/1/2024/RP/JP/</doi>

Abstract

Formulaic language contributes to demonstrating membership in a specific discourse community. However, the norms of a specific language community tend to change over time, which adds to the complexity of academic writing. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the changes in the usage of lexical bundles in scientific papers in the field of education over the last 20 years. The focus is on lexical bundles, multi word sequences that recur frequently and are distributed widely across different texts. As a prominent feature of any text, exploring their usage and change over time brings insight into the changes which occur in the academic writing style. The results showed a decrease in the usage of lexical bundles over time. Statistically significant differences were found in the structural and functional usage of lexical bundle tokens for both groups and subgroups. This indicates that the concrete bundles used over time have not significantly changed but only the frequency of their usage.