formulaicity in different macro-disciplinary domains: evidence against english for general academic purposes

Interdisciplinary variation has been an issue of concern in english for academic purposes (eap) for almost two decades. while differences between different fields of study at various linguistic levels have been acknowledged, research on macro-disciplinary variations is scarce. to fill this gap, this study investigated the use ‘lexical bundles’ in two macro-disciplinary domains of medicine and humanities. the first objective of this study was to examine the frequency of occurrence and distribution of different functional types across the two macro-disciplines. the second aim was to explore the frequency and function of the lexical bundles in three specific subsections of research articles, namely abstract, introduction and literature, results and discussion to see if interdisciplinary variation is sensitive to research articles’ sections. to these ends, we first identified the lexical bundles in our corpus of 661 research articles using wordsmith tools 5.00 software. adopting hyland’s (2008) typology, we then assigned the bundles to different functional categories and compared their use across the disciplines. our findings revealed that the use of 4-word bundles in humanity and medicine research papers is somehow similar in that they both contained many more of research-oriented bundles. another point of similarity is the limited use of participant-oriented bundles and especially engagement features in the two disciplines. study of the lexical bundles used in the research articles in medicine and humanity provided additional evidence for their importance as building blocks of discourse associated with basic communicative functions. implication of this study for eap and academic writing are explored and discussed.