Volumen 46 (2022): Edición 1 (August 2022)

Lexical bundles are recurring frequent word combinations. Research has shown that lexical bundles vary in genre and register (Biber 2006; Biber, Conrad and Cortes 2004; Hyland 2008a, 2008b; Scott and Tribble 2006). However, the degree to which they vary by discipline remains inconclusive. The main aim of this paper is to establish whether lexical bundles are discipline specific, i.e., whether each discipline draws on a specialized lexical repertoire or whether there is a core vocabulary shared across various disciplines. For that purpose, maritime texts covering the subdomains marine engineering, navigation, maritime law and shipping have been collected so as to investigate the structure and function of lexical bundles and to find out how they shape meaning in specialized discourse. For the purposes of the study, a 7.4 M corpus consisting of two monolingual subcorpora and one bilingual subcorpus was compiled. This corpus can be used as a basis for further studies in the field. Furthermore, the paper discusses problems encountered while extracting N-grams from a corpus, as well as classification criteria for the identification of lexical bundles. The results show that lexical bundles identified in maritime texts are phrasal rather than clausal. The results also indicate that lexical bundles are discipline specific. Teaching these specialized features that shape discourse can improve students’ language production and should thus be the focus of instruction in ESP.

The urgent need for new knowledge as a result of the CoViD-19 pandemic has led to a significant increase in the amount of scientific writing on the topic. Various analyses of this phenomenon from different approaches have appeared thus far (Horbach 2020; Torres-Salinas 2020). However, less attention has been paid to the impact of this situation on the language of these studies, looking into whether the continued emergency affects authors’ conscious or unconscious linguistic choices, and if so, how. This article compares texts on CoViD with texts written during the previous MERS emergency and its aftermath, trying to find if texts on CoViD present particular linguistic features reflective of this situation of urgency. Results suggest that texts on CoViD do indeed exhibit particular linguistic features, and that these point to a preference for conveying immediate knowledge and a departure from rhetorical practices common in scientific writing.