A Contrastive study between Function of Lexical Bundles in Time and USA Today Online Magazine based on Corpus Approach

ABSTRACT

This corpus-based research explores frequency and function of a particular group of formulaic expressions: lexical bundles. Lexical bundles are defined as commonly recurrent sequences of word combinations which are often semantically regular, structurally incomplete, and not idiomatic (Biber, et al., 1999). The previous corpus-based studies of multi-word sequences have been mainly concerned with variations different academic disciplines, different corpus tools and different data of writers (native or non-native speaker). Therefore, this research investigates the use of lexical bundles in different magazine but the same column, politic column.

This research aims at finding out the difference functions of lexical bundles in Time online magazine and USA Today, especially in Politic column. This research examines how the frequency of 2-3 word lexical bundles in both of the magazine and how the functions of lexical bundles.

This research uses both quantitative and qualitative analyses. This research aims to further investigate lexical bundles in terms of their functions based on the classification of lexical bundles. This research uses quantitative analyses as frequency lists of lexical bundles and then more qualitative interpretations based on the findings. The data is 30 articles from both of the magazine (TIME and USA Today Online Magazine) which were taken from two months, 1st January until 30th February. The articles were taken fromwww.TIME.com and www.USAToday.com. Each article has 750 words in TIME or USA Today Online Magazine.

The result of this research is the political news article in TIME online magazine uses lexical bundles too many than USA Today online magazine. There were 23246 two-word lexical bundle types taken from the 15 articles of USA Today online magazine. Besides, there were a total of 35309 three-word lexical bundle types taken from USA Today online magazine. While there were a total of 44324 two-word lexical bundle types taken from TIME online magazine. There were a total of 60827 three- word lexical bundles in TIME online magazine. Moreover those magazines more often use 3-word lexical bundles than 2-word lexical bundles. Researcher found the creativity, variety and pragmatic in the articles of USA Today. They tend to long wind to write something than TIME online magazine, for instance capital of Egypt, they do not use the word Cairo to express the topic. TIME online magazine more directly and precise to describe or say something, for instance : millions of, it shows that TIME online magazine more precisely to describe quantity of data (mention millions). This research is still significant to investigate because gaining control of a new language or register requires to expert user‟s preferences for sequences of words that might seem equally possible. So if learning to use the more frequent fixed phrase of an article can contribute to gain a communicative competence.