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The field of phraseology has expanded rapidly in recent years. Originally centred on the most ‘colourful’ types of units (idioms like a pain in the neck or proverbs like a bird in hand is worth two in the bush), it now encompasses a wide range of much more mundane units which were not previously considered. The expansion of the field is largely due to the use of powerful corpus linguistic techniques which make it possible to extract typical patterns of word combinations automatically. One of these techniques is the extraction of word n-grams, i.e. sequences of contiguous n words (2 words, 3 words, etc.) from a given corpus. Using this method it is possible to identify what Biber et al (1999: ch. 13) call ‘lexical bundles’, i.e. the most frequent recurring sequences of words in a register. A large number of studies, mostly focused on academic settings, have highlighted the major role that these prefabricated units play in discourse. Lexical bundles may take different structural forms (phrasal: the total number of, as a result of, and things like that; clausal: is likely to be, as shown in, I would like to) and fill a range of functions which Biber et al (2004) group into three main categories: (1) referential bundles which make direct reference to physical or abstract entities, or to the textual context itself (a lot of people, in the United States); (2) discourse organizers which reflect relationships between prior and coming discourse (with this in mind, this is why); and (3) stance bundles which express attitude or assessment of certainty (I don’t want to, it is possible to). The last two types of markers are part of the more general notion of ‘metadiscourse’, which Hyland (2005: ix) defines as the use of language to “organise texts, engage readers and signal attitudes to the material and the audience”. The lack of salience that characterizes many lexical bundles constitutes a challenge for both foreign language learners and translators or interpreters who may be led to produce awkward-sounding phrases, directly transferred from their mother tongue or the source language (Chen & Baker 2010, Bal 2010, Lee forthcoming). However, transfer remains a largely hypothetical factor, as systematic contrastive analyses of lexical bundles in different languages are very rare. This is a pity as languages differ markedly in their use of metadiscourse (cf. Sultan 2011, Zarei & Mansoori 2011) and lexical bundles are an efficient way to access those differences, as shown by Cortes’s (2008) comparison of history writing in English and Spanish.
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