A lexical bundle analysis of art-related crowdfunding projects

In the context of Open Science, crowdfunding projects are gaining increasing attention. They are becoming an alternative way of funding research and an opportunity for researchers across the disciplines to share and disseminate their work widely while engaging their potential backers. The aim of this paper is to analyze crowdfunding projects online by examining language-in-use at the level of phraseology, understanding the latter from a lexical bundle approach. Using corpus analytical approaches, the study findings show that there is a recurrence of lexical bundles conveying deontic meanings used to persuade the potential backers that the project and the research methods proposed for carrying it out are reliable and therefore trustable. Lexical bundles expressing gratitude and politeness are also recurrent, not unexpected considering that crowdfunding proposals aim to prompt the audience’s participation through donation. The findings further reveal how distinct discourse style and language features especially frequent in the conversational register realise the main communicative purpose of the genre, namely, to build credibility and trust in research with a view to persuasively enticing the backers’ audiences to donate money.