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Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing: Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise
Edited by Ute Römer-Barron, Viviana Cortes and Eric Friginal
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 95] 2020
► pp. 205–226

Adjectives as nominal pre-modifiers in chemistry and applied linguistics research articles

| Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
| Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
| Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
| Universidade Federal dos Vales do Jequitinhonha e Mucuri
| Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

This chapter analyzes the use of attributive adjectives as nominal pre-modifiers in two corpora: CorAChem (Corpus of Articles in Chemistry) and CorAAL (Corpus of Articles in Applied Linguistics) composed of 150 articles each. Our aim is to understand the use of pre-modifying adjectives in noun phrases (NPs), considering which adjectives are used as well as the NP size and frequency across disciplines. The results show that both corpora carry more classifiers than descriptors. Nevertheless, each discipline favors the use of adjectives with specific functions. Both corpora use long premodifying sequences, but CorAChem carries a greater number of longer sequences. The use of long NPs may affect understanding due to the interrelation among the NP constituents as shown in CorAChem.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1NP lexical similarities
    • 3.2Types of attributive adjectives and their NP function
    • 3.3NP size and NP sequence frequency
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.95.09dut
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