Grant writing is a critical academic endeavor across disciplines, yet the grant genre remains less explored due to its restricted accessibility. Existing research has primarily examined grant proposals based on limited datasets, with little focus on their phraseological features. Among these features are lexical frames, or discontinuous multi-word sequences (e.g., to * the impact of), often regarded as “important building blocks in discourse” (Biber & Barbieri, 2007, p. 270). However, no published studies have analyzed how lexical frames function in the rhetorical move-steps of grant proposal abstracts (GPAs). This study addresses this gap by exploring the form-function connection in GPAs across three social science disciplines (i.e., Anthropology, Linguistics, and Sociology) and analyzing variations in the distribution and use of recurrent frames and move-steps. Our dataset consists of 1,500 GPAs from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant recipients in the U.S. All texts were annotated for rhetorical move-steps, using a coding scheme adapted from Cotos (2019) and Lu et al., (2021). A corpus-driven analytic approach was used to extract frequently occurring 5-word frames. The results revealed significant disciplinary differences in both the distribution of rhetorical move-steps and the lexical frames used to realize them. Implications for discipline-specific grant writing pedagogy are discussed.