A Corpus-Driven Comparative Study of Lexical Bundles in the Conclusion Sections of Hard and Soft Science International Journal Articles

Abstract

Lexical bundles are repeated multi-word units that serve to organise information and convey disciplinary knowledge in academic writing. The use of lexical bundles in the conclusion sections of research papers, particularly across diverse fields, remains underexplored. Four-word lexical bundles in the 400 concluding paragraphs of international journal articles published in 2025 across the four fields of Applied Linguistics, Sociology, Biology, and Electrical & Electronic Engineering have been studied in this paper. AntConc was used to obtain a corpus-based list of lexical bundles and then analysed their structure and function. Lexical bundles are used widely in all fields, but their distribution and function vary among different areas of study. Soft disciplines are more likely to have interpretative and evaluative parts in the research significance and theoretical implications sections of their studies; hard sciences focus on empirical results, research outcomes and future development plans. Therefore, the above results show that lexical bundles contain disciplinary conventions and ways of knowing, and they can offer some references for research on academic writing and discipline-specific writing instruction.