Karimi, Nasrin

A Comparative Analysis of Move-specific Lexical Bundles (MLBs) in English Thesis Abstracts by L1-English an‎d L1-Persian Writers in Applied Linguistics

This corpus-based analysis compared the move structure an‎d lexical bundles (LBs) of thesis abstracts written by native Persian (L1-Persian) an‎d native English (L1-English) writers. The main aims of the study were to compare the move structures of L1-Persian an‎d L1-English thesis abstracts, identify the most frequent lexical bundles per move in each language, expose significant structural patterns of LBs in both languages, an‎d investigate their functional characteristics. With the use of qualitative techniques, moves were analyzed manually, while AntConc 4.3.1 software was used to identify lexical bundles, which were then structured an‎d functionally categorized. Results indicated that L1-Persian MA an‎d PhD thesis abstracts had more coherent organization, compared to their L1-English ones, with about 25% of L1-Persian abstracts including all five moves represented by Swales an‎d Feak an‎d almost half including four moves. In contrast, L1-English abstracts revealed a lower rate of full five-move patterns, while PhD abstracts were more organized than those of MA. Surprisingly, the L1-Persian corpus revealed a greater percentage of lexical bundles per move, reflecting greater structural coherence. Structural analysis found noun phrase-based an‎d phrasal structures to predominate across both corpora, with no verb phrase-based structures appearing in L1-English abstracts. Functionally, the majority of LBs in both corpora were research-oriented. Furthermore, text-oriented LBs were more frequent in the L1-English corpus, whereas participant-oriented LBs were more frequent in the L1-Persian corpus. The results of this study could have significant implications for human’s knowledge about linguistic variations in academic writing, providing guidance for non-native English writers, guiding the design of academic writing courses, enhancing genre studies, an‎d enhancing peer review an‎d publication procedures.