Viviana Cortes

A comparative analysis of lexical bundles in academic history writing in English and Spanish

This paper reports the findings of a study that analysed the use of lexical bundles in two corpora of academic history writing. One corpus consisted of history articles written in English and published in American journals, and the other was made up of history articles written in Spanish from Argentinian publications. The most frequent four-word lexical bundles were identified in each corpus and classified structurally and functionally. Then, the use of these bundles was compared across languages. The analyses showed that the bundles identified in each language had many features in common. While one group of bundles could be regarded as the result of direct translation, a second group of bundles showed structural characteristics that are closely related to bundles frequently found in academic writing in both languages (phrasal bundles). Finally, a functional classification showed that some bundles from both languages shared functions connected with academic prose and with the essence of the discipline, as...

Lexical bundle distribution in university classroom talk

The present study investigates the relationship between the discourse functions of lexical bundles found in classroom teaching and their position. Eighty-four lexical bundles, frequently occurring four-word combinations identified earlier in university classroom talk (Biber, Conrad, and Cortes, 2004), are tracked in the first six Vocabulary-Based Discourse Units (VBDUs) also identified previously (Biber, Csomay, Jones, and Keck, 2004) of 176 university lectures. Among others, expressions such as you might want to, I would like to, if you look at, and in the case of are traced in tandem with their previously identified classification of discourse functions. While earlier studies reported on the relationship between the bundles’ discourse functions and their position in the first three discourse units (Cortes and Csomay, 2007), there are no studies yet on how the frequency patterns may change in the second set of three discourse units.The findings of this study show a sharp increase in the use of referential bundles and those discourse organizers with a topic elaboration that focuses in the second set of discourse units. At the same time, the use of bundles expressing stance, especially those referring to personal ability and personal intention and those discourse organizers with a topic introduction, drop in the second set of discourse units. These findings provide further, lexical evidence for the claim that a strong relationship exists between intra-textual linguistic variation and the corresponding shift in discourse functions in university classes (Csomay, 2005, 2007).

Identifying Adherence Behaviors through the Study of Patient Talk in English and Spanish

The purpose of this chapter is to use exploratory corpus-based research methods to analyze English and Spanish discourse of patients with Type II diabetes in a US health-care context. The corpora were collected as part of a large project that tried to identify relationships between literacy levels and diabetes self-management (Connor et al., Commun Med 9:1–12, 2012), with patients being identified as adherent and nonadherent to their diabetes treatment when self-reporting the times they missed their medication in a given month. English-speaking and Spanish-speaking patients answered equivalent versions of an oral questionnaire and their answers were recorded and transcribed. Grammatical taggers were used for both the English (Biber, Variations across speech and writing, 1988) and Spanish texts (Biber et al., Corpora 1:1–37, 2006). Tests of significant differences were performed on the normalized tag counts to compare the language production of the patients in the adherent and nonadherent groups in each language. The results of these statistical procedures showed marked differences in the frequency of use of certain linguistic features between the two language groups and adherence level groups. For this exploratory study, we focus on the three most salient features used differently by the two groups in the English corpus, first person pronouns and possessive determiners, second person pronouns and possessive determiners, and the verb do. We also report on the only three features that were found to be significantly different across the two groups in the Spanish corpus: demonstrative pronouns, simple conjunctions and complex conjunctions or subordinators, and augmentative adjectives. These features are analyzed in the language in which they originated and compared to the production of the patients in the counterpart language to try to discover whether their use can bring about more information regarding the way these groups of patients refer to diabetes and their courses of treatment.