A Cross-disciplinary Corpus-based Analysis of the Frequency and Syntactic Positions of Adverbials

Abstract

Adverbials have been studied numerously by different linguists and have been classified and categorized differently across time by different syntacticians (Bellert 1977; Cinque 1999; Ernst 2002; Delfitto 2007) and semanticists (Ernst 2002; Bonami et al. 2004; Jackendoff 1972). However, all these studies have been conducted in discipline-specific domains. To fill this gap, the main focus of this study is to investigate the frequency of adverbials and their syntactic positions. For this purpose, we have designed our study to be on academically published research articles (RAs) in two hard sciences of Medicine and Engineering, and two soft sciences of Literary Studies and Linguistics. The results indicate that Literary papers have the greatest number of adverbials with 102 and Medical papers have the lowest with only 39 adverbials. In fact, this frequency of adverbials can show the direction of each discipline. When a discipline is based on facts, the researchers use more factual language rather than descriptive one to illustrate the real world. However, human sciences make all attempts to describe the world in which people live so they need a more descriptive language to fulfill their purpose. In terms of position, looking at the eight positions proposed by Quirk et al. (1985), the Medial position is the most favorite of all. In addition, End and Initial positions have second and third popularity in turn. In total, adverbials, due to their flexibility and free movement in sentences, belong to a very complicated class of words that require more research. Furthermore, writers should consider the objectives of their discipline in order to decide what type of adverbials to use and in which position.