Syntactic patterns in scientific sublanguages: A study of four disciplines

Abstract

A sample of 2032 sentences from the literature of four subject disciplines was analyzed to uncover regularities and significant differences among them in their use of various syntactic features. Among those features analyzed, which are necessary parts of a well formed sentence, it was found that the two disciplines representing the social sciences rarely differ significantly from each other, and the same is true of the two hard science disciplines. However, when hard and social sciences are compared, the differences are often significant. Among syntactic features which are not necessary to a sentence, the social science disciplines still show few significant differences, but the two hard science disciplines show many more significant differences. A variety of syntactic regularities is also noted. © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.