Structural and functional analyses of four-word lexical bundles from the articles in the Forbes website

Lexical bundles are multiword sequences that commonly co-occur in a register (Bier & Conrad, 1999). Therefore, the lexical bundles used in various registers should be explored and investigated. The present study aimed to investigate and analyze the structures and discourse functions of lexical bundles employed in online articles regarding AI and 5G in Forbes.com, which belong to the journalism register. For these purposes, 362 articles under the AI and 5G subsections in Forbes.com were collected to build a corpus. The list of four-word lexical bundles was generated with the use of AntConc software. The structures of the bundles were analyzed and classified according to Biber et al.’s (2004) taxonomy, while the discourse functions were analyzed and classified employing Biber et al.’s (2004) and Hyland’s (2008b) taxonomies. The results revealed that the most prevalent structure used in the journalism register was lexical bundles incorporating noun phrase and prepositional phrase fragments. Regarding the discourse functions, most bundles served as research-oriented bundles or referential expressions.