Embodiment of rhetorical moves in lexical bundles in abstracts of the medical sciences

Abstract

This study investigates the embodiment of rhetorical moves in general and technical lexical bundles (LBs) in the abstract sections (ASs) of research articles in medical sciences and the relationship between them. A corpus of 1 500 empirically oriented ASs of approximately 414 000 words from recently published Institute for Scientific Education-indexed journals was compiled and analysed. The results indicated that some general and technical LBs displayed move-bound behaviour and tended to cluster in certain moves more often than in the others (move-exclusive LBs), while other LBs were used indiscriminately throughout the moves (ubiquitous LBs). In addition, the analysis of general, as well as technical LBs revealed that the LBs acted as either triggers or complements. Generally, ubiquitous general LBs acted as complements, whereas exclusive general LBs functioned as triggers. All technical LBs were complements. This study found that there are connections between moves and technical LBs, all of which were used as complements. This study suggests that the developments of LB banks per se in different fields of science are not enough, and researchers could delve further through establishing the associations and connections between LBs and moves, which could be used as reference materials in academic writing courses in English for research publication purposes (ERPP).