Chapter 3. Fine-tuning lexical bundles

This chapter has two major aims. First, it attempts to extend earlier research on recurrent phraseologies used in the pharmaceutical field (Grabowski 2015) by exploring the use, distribution and functions of lexical bundles found in English texts describing drug-drug interactions. Conducted from an applied perspective, the study uses 300 text samples extracted from DrugDDI Corpus originally collected in the Drugbank database (Segura-Bedmar et al. 2010). Apart from presenting new descriptive data, the second aim of the chapter is to reflect on the ways lexical bundles have been typically explored across different text types and genres. The problems discussed in the chapter concern the methods used to deal with structurally incomplete bundles, filter out overlapping bundles, and select, for the purposes of qualitative analyses, a representative sample of bundles other than the most frequent ones. This chapter is therefore meant to help researchers fine tune the methodologies used to explore lexical bundles depending on the specificity of the research material, research questions and scope of the analysis.