Corpus Analysis Of Reporting Verbs In Abstracts To Research Articles

Abstract

The authors of this article employ the methods of corpus linguistics to study the semantics of general scientific verbs of the lexical-semantic group of reporting in order to study the semantic organization and thematic ordering of this group of English-language predicates in abstracts. The categorical taxonomic meaning of reporting verbs provides an appropriate perception of information when compressing the main text of a research article. Studies that exist in this area comprise the analyses of the rhetorical structure or linguo-cognitive organization of research articles abstracts in various subject areas. Paradigmatics and syntagmatics of lexical units in general and predicates in particular remain not fully understood within the framework of abstracts. Consequently, the relevance of the subject of the study, namely verbs of reporting in abstracts, is due to the objective need to perform the communicative task of creating or translating a research article abstract mainly from Russian into English. At the same time, the non-English academic community needs access to authentic research, the understanding of which occurs mainly basing on proposition predicates. Based on the material of the сompiled corpus of 500 research article abstracts in the subject field of linguistics, the use of automated quantitative and qualitative methods of corpus analysis makes the selection of predicates and forms the lexical-semantic group of reporting with the semantic dominant to show, which reveals the highest frequency of use in abstracts. Along with the nuclear semantics to show, the semes: emergence of knowledge; confirmation of knowledge; clarification of knowledge; accentuation of knowledge; overview of knowledge, organize the space of the lexical-semantic group of reporting and, therefore, the texts of abstracts. Syntagmatics of the studied verbs is limited to four types of combination models of a verb and a direct object; a verb and a prepositional object; a verb and a subordinate clause; as well as a verb and an infinitive, where the first model is most frequent and the last one is least frequent.