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Article published In: English Text Construction
Vol. 7:1 (2014) ► pp.84–121

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Lexical bundles and phrase frames in the language of hotel websites

Published online: 28 April 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.7.1.04fus
Hotel websites have been researched from the perspective of vocabulary and discourse. However, little attention has been paid to lexical bundles and phrase frames in these text types. In this paper, I show by means of an empirical analysis that such word sequences characterise these sites as a highly specialised domain. With this aim in mind, I have analysed a corpus of British hotel websites containing 242,000 words from a database, currently being compiled by the research group COMETVAL. I show that bundles and frames follow very similar principles but differ in flexibility. Moreover, the existence of frames shows collaboration between the idiom and open-choice principle. In fact, most bundles in my corpus are instances of phrase frames.
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