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Article published In:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 15:2 (2015) ► pp.162–180

Unusual sentence structure in wine tasting notes

A contrastive corpus-based study

| ACTRES. Universidad de Valladolid (Spain)
| ACTRES. University of Ottawa (Canada)
Certain sentence structures occur more frequently than others in specialized texts. The vast majority of sentences in the English of both science and technology seem to be declarative in nature, while imperative sentences, which are the normal method of expressing instructions, occur far more frequently in English for Technology than in English for Science. Despite such differences in sentence structure, all these specialized texts have one element in common: they all use regular or major sentences. What sets wine tasting notes apart from other specialized genres is their use of irregular or minor sentences, along with regular sentences. The purpose of this study is to analyze the use of irregular sentences in English and Spanish tasting notes — their frequency, their positioning, possible reasons for their use — using an English and Spanish comparable corpus. Our starting point was the hypothesis that English wine tasting notes would contain more irregular sentences than the Spanish notes. However, our corpus analysis showed that this was not the case.
Keywords: regular sentences, rhetorical structure, verbless sentences, irregular sentences, wine tasting notes, English/Spanish
Published online: 19 November 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.15.2.01lop
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