LSB2013 conference - Genre- and Register-related Text and Discourse Features in Multilingual Corpora

11-12 January 2013 - Institut libre Marie Haps, Brussels (Belgium) - www.mariehaps.be/lsb2013

A lexical bundle approach to comparing languages: Organizational and stance markers in

English and French

Sylviane Granger
Université catholique de Louvain, Centre for English Corpus Linguistics

The field of phraseology has expanded rapidly in recent years. Originally centred on the most
‘colourful’ types of units (idioms like a pain in the neck or proverbs like a bird in hand is
worth two in the bush), it now encompasses a wide range of much more mundane units
which were not previously considered. The expansion of the field is largely due to the use of
powerful corpus linguistic techniques which make it possible to extract typical patterns of
word combinations automatically. One of these techniques is the extraction of word n-grams,
i.e. sequences of contiguous n words (2 words, 3 words, etc.) from a given corpus. Using this
method it is possible to identify what Biber et al (1999: ch. 13) call ‘lexical bundles’, i.e. the
most frequent recurring sequences of words in a register. A large number of studies, mostly
focused on academic settings, have highlighted the major role that these prefabricated units
play in discourse. Lexical bundles may take different structural forms (phrasal: the total
number of, as a result of, and things like that; clausal: is likely to be, as shown in, I would like
to) and fill a range of functions which Biber et al (2004) group into three main categories: (1)
referential bundles which make direct reference to physical or abstract entities, or to the
textual context itself (a lot of people, in the United States); (2) discourse organizers which
reflect relationships between prior and coming discourse (with this in mind, this is why); and
(3) stance bundles which express attitude or assessment of certainty (I don’t want to, it is
possible to). The last two types of markers are part of the more general notion of
‘metadiscourse’, which Hyland (2005: ix) defines as the use of language to “organise texts,
engage readers and signal attitudes to the material and the audience”. The lack of salience
that characterizes many lexical bundles constitutes a challenge for both foreign language
learners and translators or interpreters who may be led to produce awkward-sounding
phrases, directly transferred from their mother tongue or the source language (Chen &
Baker 2010, Bal 2010, Lee forthcoming). However, transfer remains a largely hypothetical
factor, as systematic contrastive analyses of lexical bundles in different languages are very
rare. This is a pity as languages differ markedly in their use of metadiscourse (cf. Sultan 2011,
Zarei & Mansoori 2011) and lexical bundles are an efficient way to access those differences,
as shown by Cortes’s (2008) comparison of history writing in English and Spanish.

The purpose of my presentation is to demonstrate the value of the lexical bundle approach
for crosslinguistic research. My focus will be on the use of organizational and stance markers
in in comparable corpora of English and French, i.e. corpora consisting of original texts in the
two languages matched by criteria such as genre, time of publication, etc. (Johansson 2007).
As French is described as more explicitly conjunctive and emphatic than English (Vinay &
Darbelnet 1995 [1958]: 234ff and 220ff; Delisle 1993: 432) and generally more verbose, my
hypothesis is that metadiscursive bundles will tend to be more frequent in French than in
English. I will also investigate the balance between impersonal it-constructions expressing
modality (it is true that/il est vrai que) and personal I/we-references marking authorial
presence (I believe that/je crois que) in each language. It is difficult to formulate a hypothesis
in this area as the English-French contrastive literature contains seemingly contradictory
claims: Vinay & Darbelnet (ibid: 216) contend that French favours subjective representation

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 LSB2013 conference - Genre- and Register-related Text and Discourse Features in Multilingual Corpora
11-12 January 2013 - Institut libre Marie Haps, Brussels (Belgium) - www.mariehaps.be/lsb2013

of reality whilst English tends towards objective representation (On était au commencement
de février vs. It was the beginning of February), while Chuquet & Paillard (1987: 141)
highlight the preference for structures with animate subjects in English and impersonal
structures in French (Of course everyone is free to go window-shopping in France vs. Il est
certes loisible à chacun, en France, de faire du lèche-vitrine).

My investigation differs from previous cross-linguistic studies of metadiscourse in two major

ways. First, it focuses on longer metadiscursive markers while most studies focus on single
words (admittedly, however) or compound-like units (in fact, on the other hand). Secondly, it
does not rely on a pre-established list of markers but uses a fully corpus-driven method to
identify them. The analysis is based on two subcorpora of English and French extracted from
a version of the Europarl corpus which clearly identifies the source vs. target status of the
two languages (Cartoni et al 2011, Cartoni & Meyer 2012)1. Using the WordSmith Tools text
retrieval program (Scott 1996), I extracted the lexical bundles of 3 or more words
automatically from the two subcorpora and subjected them to structural and functional
analysis based on taxonomies inspired by Chesterman (1998), Biber et al (1999 & 2004),
Biber & Barbieri (2007), Hyland (2005) and Cortes (2008).

As amply demonstrated in the literature (Biber et al 1999, Ninisha 2007), the quantity and
quality of lexical bundles - and of metadiscursive markers in particular - are highly sensitive
to genre. The second stage of the investigation aims to assess to what extent the similarities
and differences uncovered by the analysis of the Europarl subcorpora reflect general
characteristics of the two languages or whether they are limited to the genre of
parliamentary debates. To achieve this aim, the analysis was replicated on corpora
representing a different genre, viz. editorials from quality papers in English and French
extracted from the Mult-Ed corpus2 and the results compared with those based on Europarl.
For English, additional insights on the impact of genre can be gained from a comparison of
the Europarl results with studies of lexical bundles in written EU documents (Trebits 2009
and Jablonkai 2010).

The concluding part of the presentation sums up the main results of the study, suggests
avenues for future research and considers ways of applying the methodology to a number of
fields, in particular bilingual lexicography.

References

Bal, B. (2010). Analysis of four-word lexical bundles in published research articles written by
Turkish scholars. Applied Linguistics and English as a Second Language Theses. Paper 2.
http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/alesl_theses/2
Bereczky, K. (2007). Marking logical connection in presentations. WoPaLP Vol. 1, 78-98.
Biber, D. & Barbieri, F. (2007). Lexical bundles in university spoken and written registers.
English for Specific Purposes 26, 263–286.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of
Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.

1
I would like to express my gratitude to Bruno Cartoni for giving me access to this version of the corpus.
2
For a description of Mult-Ed, see http://www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-multed.html

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 LSB2013 conference - Genre- and Register-related Text and Discourse Features in Multilingual Corpora
11-12 January 2013 - Institut libre Marie Haps, Brussels (Belgium) - www.mariehaps.be/lsb2013

Biber, D., Conrad, S. & Cortes, V. (2004). If you look at … Lexical bundles in university
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