A comparative analysis of lexical bundles in academic history writing in English and Spanish

This paper reports the findings of a study that analysed the use of lexical bundles in two corpora of academic history writing. One corpus consisted of history articles written in English and published in American journals, and the other was made up of history articles written in Spanish from Argentinian publications. The most frequent four-word lexical bundles were identified in each corpus and classified structurally and functionally. Then, the use of these bundles was compared across languages. The analyses showed that the bundles identified in each language had many features in common. While one group of bundles could be regarded as the result of direct translation, a second group of bundles showed structural characteristics that are closely related to bundles frequently found in academic writing in both languages (phrasal bundles). Finally, a functional classification showed that some bundles from both languages shared functions connected with academic prose and with the essence of the discipline, as well as to the topics discussed in the publications from which the texts had been extracted.