This present study identifies the most frequently used lexical bundles in argumentative essays written by L1 English and L2 Taiwanese undergraduate students and compares the use of high-frequency lexical bundles between these two groups of writers. Drawing student-produced argumentative essays from the ICNALE (International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) (Ishikawa, 2013), we established two sub-corpora: ICNALE-TW with 400 essays produced by L2 writers from Taiwan and ICNALE-EN as a comparable dataset with 400 essays contributed by native speakers. Based on the structural and functional taxonomy proposed by Biber and his colleagues (Biber et al., 1999), the forms and functions of four-word lexical bundles used by L1 and L2 students were manually annotated. The findings reveal that among the top 100 lexical bundles identified from the two sub-corpora, 16 lexical bundles are shared by L1 and L2 student writers and that through structural and functional analyses, both L1 and L2 writers’ lexical bundles exhibit a similar tendency, consisting mostly of verb phrases and stance related expressions. The findings presented in this study may have pedagogical implications with respect to the instruction of formulaic language in academic writing at the tertiary level.

In the internet age, the proliferation of fake news is a global concern (Lazer
et al., 2018). Despite the growing number of computational techniques for identifying digital news articles as untruthful based on their textual features, concerns about machine-based solutions have arisen. To complement the insufficiency of machine algorithms and gaining a clearer picture of the linguistic features in fake news, this study investigated the use of lexical bundles in illegitimate news by establishing a corpus of 100 false news texts obtained from the crackdown of stock promotion schemes in the United States in 2017. A total of 55 four-word lexical bundles were identified and analyzed through adapting and adopting the taxonomy devised by Biber et al. (1999). The findings reveal that (1) these identified lexical bundles are dominated by NP-based expressions and (2) referential bundles account for over half of the 55 instances, followed up an additional subcategory (i.e., subject-specific lexical bundles) of medical or financial vocabulary. It is hoped that these findings may shed some light on the recognition of misinformation and draw the attention of readers to some implicit features of untruthful journalistic language.