An important component of fluent linguistic production and a key distinguishing feature of particular modes, registers and genres is the multi-word expressions referred to as ‘lexical bundles’. These are extended collocations which appear more frequently than expected by chance, helping to shape meanings and contributing to our sense of coherence and distinctiveness in a text. These strings have been studied extensively, particularly in academic writing in English, but little is known about how they may have changed over time. In this paper we explore changes in their use and frequency over the past 50 years, drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from top research journals in four disciplines. We find that bundles are not static and invariant markers of research writing but change in response to new conditions and contexts, with the most interesting changes within disciplines. The paper also discusses methodological approaches to studying bundles diachronically.

中文翻译：

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学术词汇包

流利的语言生产的一个重要组成部分和特定模式、语域和体裁的一个关键区别特征是被称为“词汇束”的多词表达。这些是扩展的搭配，偶然出现的频率比预期的要高，有助于塑造意义并有助于我们在文本中的连贯性和独特性。这些字符串已被广泛研究，特别是在英语学术写作中，但人们对它们如何随着时间的推移而发生的变化知之甚少。在本文中，我们利用来自四个学科的顶级研究期刊的 220 万个单词的语料库，探讨了它们在过去 50 年中的使用和频率的变化。我们发现束不是研究写作的静态和不变标记，而是随着新条件和上下文而变化，学科内最有趣的变化。本文还讨论了历时研究丛的方法论方法。