Formal and functional variation of lexical bundles in biomedical English

This study is an investigation of the morphosyntactic, lexical and functional variation of lexical bundles in scientific writing. In this chapter, we discuss the various methodological issues involved in the analysis of the structural variability and multifunctionality of lexical bundles, and the methodological approach we developed to address these variations. This approach involved grouping lexical bundles by shared keywords, applying the notion of prototypical bundle (Salazar 2011) and assigning lexical bundles to functions rather than linking pre-established functions to individual bundles. These additional steps were central to the creation of a pedagogically and lexicographically relevant list of lexical bundles for inclusion in SciE-Lex.