ABSTRACT
An important component of fluent linguistic production is control of the multi-word expressions referred to as clusters, chunks or bundles. Bundles are statistically the most frequent recurring sequences of words in any collection of texts: extended collocations which appear more repeatedly than expected by chance. The importance of frequent multi-word combinations in assisting communication has long been acknowledged in applied linguistics. By making language more predictable to the hearer/reader they function as processing short-cuts, retrieved from memory as chunks rather than generated anew on each occasion. The form of lexical bundles is a distinguishing feature of academic discourse. Electrical engineering and biology have reduced the proportion of bundles devoted to research, biology recording the steepest fall and from the highest point. The soft knowledge fields have been slowly moving in the opposite direction towards more ‘author-evacuated’ forms, replacing participant bundles with research and text-oriented ones.
