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Abstract

The point of departure for this study is Stubbs and Barth‘s article from 2003 where they describe how recurrent phrases can be used as text-type discriminators. A subset of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus—a corpus of student writing—consisting of English Studies essays is compared with two text-types taken from BNC-Baby in order to test and validate Stubbs and Barth‘s claims about recurrent word-combinations. Then the most salient combinations occurring in the BAWE student essays are subjected to a functional analysis, based on Moon (1998), to better be able to say something about their main functions in this text-type. Finally, the functions of recurrent phrases of the BAWE essays will be compared to the functional characteristics of the academic prose part of BNC-Baby.

Keywords: recurrent word-combinations, ngrams, lexical bundles, functional analysis, text-type discriminator, corpus-based analysis