De acordo com a…: Lexical Bundles and Disciplinary Variation in Academic Brazilian Portuguese

Research on formulaic language has shown that few lexical bundles overlap across disciplines in expert academic writing, with disciplinary writing being characterized by specific bundles. This was proven to be the case in both English (Hyland, 2008) and Spanish (Cortes, 2008). This paper explores the use of lexical bundles in Portuguese academic writing in two disciplinary groups, life sciences and humanities. Using a corpus of research articles written by Brazilian scientists, four-word bundles were extracted and compared for their function (Biber; Conrad; Cortes, 2004) and structure (Biber; Johansson; Leech; Conrad; Finegan, 1999). The results of this study indicate that writing for life sciences contains more formulaic language, with referential bundles being used more frequently to refer to research participants and places; and humanities writing contains fewer bundles overall and more diversity in function types than life sciences. The results of this paper can help us understand the use of lexical bundles in Portuguese and inform the development of materials for teaching Portuguese as both an L1 and L2.