ON BEHALF OF PROF. JOHN FLOWERDEW
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
RE: LEXICAL BUNDLES.
I notice that all of the studies I have read on
this topic have
focussed on 4 word bundles and that you they have
all used what I
would call large corpora i.e. many millions of
words. The rationale
seems to be that with 5 word bundles you do not
get enough to analyse
and that with three word bundles there are
probably too many to
handle.
I want to do a study of bundles on a specific
corpus I have, but
which only has 600,000 words. To be able to work
with large numbers
of bundles, it would therefore make sense to focus
on 3 word bundles.
I could do a study on 4 word bundles, but the
sample would be smaller.
So my question is, do people see any disadvantages
on focusing on
3-word bundles and, if so, what they might be?
Looking forward to hearing your responses.
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