Lexical cohesion in popular and theoretical scientific texts; Distribution of sentence adverbials in native vs. non-native academic papers
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
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| Description | Lexical cohesion, i.e. selection of lexical items in some way related to other lexical items in a text, contributes importantly to creating the texture, and increases the overall coherence of the text. The lecture looks into different devices of lexical cohesion employed in scientific texts, namely reiterations (including exact repetitions and synonyms), use of superordinate expressions and general terms, and marginally also collocations. It is built upon an assumption that two basic types of scientific text, popular and theoretical ones, display some differences in the ratios between these lexical cohesive devices as well as in the frequency of their occurrence in each individual type. The analysis has been undertaken on two corpora of texts dealing with various topics in physics, comparing a text which is highly theoretical with one covering the same respective topic, adapted rather for didactic purposes or purposes of popular science. Lexical chains reveal the cohesive links between thematic elements of the texts and highlight the differences between individual texts matched in pairs. Particularly the use of general and superordinate lexemes in contrast to exact repetitions has proved to be the feature distinguishing between the two text varieties. Academic papers in English and the distribution of sentence adverbials by native vs. non-native writers The use of sentence adverbials, i.e. syntactically and/or prosodically detached conjunctive and disjunctive adverbials, is one of the most powerful tools for achieving cohesion in academic texts. Although the genre of academic papers reveals a tendency to some degree of formal uniformity without individual disciplines as the discourses are becoming increasingly international, there persist significant differences in frequency as well as distribution of lexical and grammatical devices between native and non-native users of English. The lecture examines preferences of these two groups in the use of sentence adverbials in academic papers dealing with humanities. The research draws on several corpora of expert and novice native and non-native academic texts. Among the findings of the analysis are observable tendencies to overusing or underusing certain adverbials and their distributional patterns displayed by individual groups of authors. |