What it is
A lexical bundle is whatever a genre repeats often enough to be counted, and nothing else qualifies it. It is usually not a complete grammatical unit and usually not idiomatic, so it is not what anyone would pick out as a phrase. It is what a reader of the genre has met before. in accordance with the and the provisions of the are bundles, and neither is something a speaker would list.
The class is arrived at by counting and then sorted by what the sequences do: stance expressions, discourse organizers and referential expressions. That taxonomy is functional rather than structural, which is how a fragment ends up in the same class as a clause. Registers differ sharply on it. Classroom teaching carries more stance and discourse-organizing bundles than conversation and more referential ones than academic prose, so an inventory describes a register rather than a language.
Two boundaries. A bundle is a unit because a threshold said so, which the previous record deals with; what matters here is that somebody chose the threshold. And a doublet is fixed as a pair by usage, while a bundle exists because it recurs, so a sequence can be one without being the other. A bundle containing a term stays here, because no term settles where it begins or ends.
Where the fixity comes from
Nothing prescribes a bundle. It exists because a genre repeats it, and the evidence is a count over a stated corpus at a stated cut-off.
- Tománková's four legal subcorpora run to 129,552 words of academic and study texts in 6 documents, 39,001 words of judicial decisions in 9, 77,387 words of European Union legislation in 9, and 175,820 words of contracts in 10. A sequence is admitted at 30 occurrences per million words and presence in at least half the texts, raised to 60 per million for her second analysis, and she works on four-word bundles because they classify most cleanly.
- What that leaves open is the inventory itself, which moves with the cut-off, the corpus and the chosen length. Four subcorpora produce four inventories, not one list for legal language.
- The functional taxonomy comes from Biber, Conrad and Cortes; no threshold does. Every number here belongs to the study that declared it.
Consequences for translation
A bundle is what a reader of the target genre has met before, and the source cannot tell you what that is.
- The target bundle is found in target-language texts of the same genre, not derived from the source. Rendered word by word it stays grammatical and reads as foreign, which is the hardest defect to point at in review.
- The inventories do not map one to one. One language can use a single recurrent sequence where another uses two different ones, and a third can have nothing in that position at all.
- Length is a method choice. Four-word sequences are counted because they sort well, so an inventory is a slice through the genre and not a list of its units.
- A count from one genre is no authority in another, and a bundle frequency quoted without its corpus and its cut-off is an assertion rather than evidence.
Examples
EN>NL
- Source: for the purposes of conducting a criminal prosecution
- Target: met het oog op strafvervolging
- Comment: Council Framework Decision 2002/584/JHA, Article 1(1). Dutch has no counterpart to the English bundle and reaches for met het oog op, which the same sentence has already used for the English with a view to: two English sequences, one Dutch one. Composing gives voor de toepassing van, a real bundle of this genre that belongs in another position.
EN>DE
- Source: for the purposes of conducting a criminal prosecution
- Target: zur Strafverfolgung
- Comment: Same provision. German uses a contracted preposition and a noun, so at this position there is no recurrent sequence to inventory at all. A position that carries a bundle in two languages can carry none in a third.
EN>IT
- Source: for the purposes of conducting a criminal prosecution
- Target: ai fini dell'esercizio di un'azione penale
- Comment: Same provision again. Italian does have a bundle here, ai fini di, and it keeps a noun for what English carries as a gerund and Dutch leaves out. Three target genres, three shapes, none of them recoverable from the English.
References
- Biber, D., Conrad, S. and Cortes, V. (2004). "If you look at ...: lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks." Applied Linguistics 25(3), 371 to 405.
- Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. (2011). Patterns of Linguistic Variation in American Legal English: A Corpus-Based Study. Łódź Studies in Language 22. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
- Breeze, R. (2013). "Lexical bundles across four legal genres." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18(2), 229 to 253.
- Tománková, V. (2016). "Lexical bundles in legal texts corpora: selection, classification and pedagogical implications." Discourse and Interaction 9(2), 75 to 94, at pp. 78, 79 and 81.
- Council Framework Decision 2002/584/JHA of 13 June 2002 on the European arrest warrant and the surrender procedures between Member States, Article 1(1), English, Dutch, German and Italian language versions.