Earticle

This study aims to investigate how the three criteria—frequency threshold, dispersion, and bundle length—interact with and affect the results of bundle analysis in relation to disciplinary variation and the specificity-generality continuum. Drawing on a corpus of academic journal articles across eight disciplines, lexical bundles were extracted across eight disciplines using multiple combinations of frequency, dispersion, and bundle length criteria, and disciplinary differences were analyzed using Log-likelihood tests. The analysis reveals overall statistically significant differences in bundle use across major domains, despite lower significance in some cross- and within-domain comparisons. The findings indicate a clear tendency toward disciplinary specificity. Importantly, methodological choices, particularly bundle length and dispersion, substantially affect results among certain disciplines within the same domain, especially in relation to specificity-generality. These findings corroborate the presence of disciplinary variation and provide valuable insights into the specificity-generality debate and ESP instruction. Further study should employ more balanced and data-driven corpus designs that incorporate a wider range of genres.