Keywords and key lexical bundles as cues to knowledge construction in RAs in economics

Numerous studies have recently focussed on lexical bundles, or extended collocations which we encounter in specific genres more frequently than expected by chance. As such, they help characterize disciplinary discourses. Using the tools of corpus linguistics, we explore a 2.7 word million corpus and focus on discourse signalling devices, and 5-word, 4-word, and 3-word bundles in particular. This enables us to identify the basic means of knowledge construction in research articles in economics as against research articles in history and business/marketing. Data analysis provides compelling evidence for seeing discourse-signals in RAs in economics as realizing conditional prediction and empirical hypothesis within the macro-speech acts of hypothesis, analysis/interpretation/generalization, and prediction.