Дискурсивно-стилистический анализ английской письменной научной речи. Учебное пособие

Exercise 3. Find formal synonyms for the following words.

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Exercise 4. Choose a verb from the list that reduces the informality of each sentence.

Assist, establish, reduce, increase, create, determine, investigate, fluctuate, raise, eliminate

1.Expert Systems can help out the user in the diagnosis of problems.

2.This program was set up to improve access to medical care.

3.Research expenditures have gone up to nearly $350 million.

4.The use of optical character readers (OCRs) should cut down the number of problems with the U.S. mail service.

5.Researchers have found out that this drug has serious side effects.

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6.Building a nuclear power plant will not get rid of the energy problem completely.

7.Researchers have been looking into this problem for 15 years now.

8.This issue was brought up during the investigation.

9.Engineers can come up with better designs using CAD.

10.The emission levels have been going up and down.

Exercise 5. Choose a verb from the list that reduces the informality of each sentence.

Consider, decrease, develop, investigate, reach, constitute, determine, eliminate, maintain, tolerate

1.Many software manufacturers in developed countries put up with widespread copyright violations in less developed countries and often even offer local versions of their products.

2.Scientists are looking into innovative drug delivery systems that can transport and deliver a drug precisely and safely to its site of action.

3.The purpose of this paper is to try to figure out what is lacking in our current understanding of corrosion and corrosion protection in concrete.

4.Researchers have come up with plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEV) that can draw from two sources of energy: stored electrical energy from the grid and stored chemical energy in the form of fuel such as gasoline.

5.Rice and aquatic products make up a major part of the diet of the people in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam.

6.The use of touch screen voting systems could get rid of many problems associated with traditional paper-based ballots.

7.Worldwide consumption of pesticides has gone up to 2.6 million metric tons.

8.Although labor unions in the U.S. have been able to keep up their membership numbers over the last two decades, they have been losing their political strength.

9.The number of mature female green turtles that return to their primary nesting beach has gone down from 1,280 ten years ago to 145 today.

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10. Many funding agencies worldwide are thinking about ways to give new researchers greater opportunities to receive grant money.

Exercise 6. Reduce the informality of each sentence by substituting a single verb for the underlined one.

1.The implementation of computer-integrated-manufacturing (CIM) has brought about some serious problems.

2.The process should be done over until the desired results are achieved.

3.Plans are being made to come up with a database containing detailed environmental information for the region.

4.Subtle changes in the earth’s crust were picked up by these new devices.

5.Proposals to construct new nuclear reactors have met with great resistance from environmentalists.

6.Researchers have come up with a number of models to describe the effect of certain cola drinks on dental enamel erosion.

7.AIDS researchers have run into a variety of unexpected problems in their efforts to develop an effective vaccine.

8.Recent studies on car scrapping have brought up the important question as to whether CO2 emissions can be significantly reduced by taking old cars out of service.

9.Problems with the new data management software showed up soon after it was launched.

10.In the past five years, many studies have looked at the effect of different grassland management practices.

Exercise 7. Which of the underlined words would be more suitable for an academic paper?

1.The government has made good / considerable progress in solving environmental problems.

2.We got / obtained encouraging results.

3.The results of a lot of / numerous different projects have been pretty good/encouraging.

4.Aloss of jobs is one of the things that will happen / consequences if the process is automated.

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5.Crash test dummies are really important for / an integral part of automotive crash tests.

6.According to a recent study just about / nearly 25% of all cell phone users view text messaging as an important source of entertainment.

7.There has been a lot of / considerable interest in how background sounds such as music affect an individual’s ability to concentrate.

8.We obtained robust / nice results using structural bamboo rather than timber.

9.Consumer interest in electronic billing and payment is getting bigger and bigger / increasing.

Exercise 8. Supply a more academic word or phrase for the one underlined in each sentence.

1.The reaction of the officials was sort of negative.

2.The economic outlook is mighty nice.

3.The future of Federal funding is up in the air.

4.America’s major automakers are planning to get together on the research needed for more fuel efficient cars.

5.The competition faced by U.S. growers from imports of fresh vegetables has gotten more intense.

6.Many urban areas do not have enough land to build new public schools.

7.Allergic reactions to local dental anesthesia do not happen very often.

8.The doors on these ferries were made bigger to make it easier to load and unload vehicles.

Exercise 9. Rewrite the sentences in more formal style.

1.Another thing to think about is the chance of crime getting worse.

2.Regrettably these days lots of people don’t have jobs.

3.Sometime soon they will find a vaccine for malaria.

4.Afew years ago the price of property in Japan went down a lot.

5.You can’t always trust the numbers in that report.

6.Sadly, the high inflation led to poverty, social unrest and so on.

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7.He was over the moon when he won the prize.

8.I think we should pay students to study.

9.Afew years ago they allowed women to vote.

10.What were the main causes of the Russian Revolution?

11.If you fail the exam, you can’t enter the university.

12.OK, what are the causes of deformation? Many possibilities

exist.

13.Youcanclearlyseethedifferencebetweenthesetwoprocesses.

14.A small bit of ammonium dichromate is added to the gelatin solution gradually.

15.These special tax laws have been enacted in six states: Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, etc.

16.The subjects didn’t have much difficulty with the task.

17.You can use this model to optimize the water supply.

18.So, why did the bridge collapse? There’re a lot of reasons.

19.In addition to herbs, animal products are employed in some forms of traditional medicine frequently.

20.So far there hasn’t been much research on how conflict influences the level of trust and respect in a group.

21.There are several studies in Epidemiology that have shown that when people consume alcohol in moderate amounts they have a lower risk of developing heart disease in comparison to those people who drink a lot of alcohol.

22.Developed by computer scientists in the 1980s, data mining is a collection of methods aiming to understand and make money from the massive data sets being collected by supermarket scanners, weather buoys, intelligence satellites, and so on.

Exercise 10. Identify the inconsistency in levels of formality in the following text fragment and revise it.

Perplexity is an emotion, which is some kind of borderline, as one may think, and which for many people seems to mean nothing. However, it may be the emotion that prevails in the modern global culture and in national cultures. It is simply foolish to deny the catastrophic and almost all-consuming influence of globalization on our lives. One

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of the fruits of globalization is perplexity. The claim to unify all cultures, bringing them under a common denominator represented by one dominant culture and the obtrusive realization of this claim led to the fact that almost any national or even ethnic culture was confused: it lost some of its features and values and lost its music in the world melody of cultures, one can say it lost its landmark. Moreover, a person who is, in varying degrees, the creator of culture, is also confused. Often he cannot understand exactly who he is, whether he is in his place or in that cultural environment.

Academic word list

Agood tool to acquire and expand academic vocabulary is theAcademic Word List (AWL). It is a list of 570 word families that are commonly found in academic texts. This list was selected by examining a large corpus (or collection) of written academic texts. The AWL does not include terminology or the vocabulary characteristic for a specific study and research area. It focuses on the non-subject-specific vocabulary that students of any discipline will need to master in order to produce coherently-structured academic texts. TheAWLcovers up to 10% ofthevocabularycoveredinwrittenacademictexts.Thismeansthat,on average, one word in 10 in an academic text is in theAWL.

TheAWLis provided in theAppendix B.

Word families

Academic writing requires the mastering of academic vocabulary, i.e. special vocabulary commonly used in all academic texts. The most important issues in learning academic vocabulary is its extraordinary large size. The quickest and easiest way to increase vocabulary is to analyze and understand the word structure and the world formation principles in English.

Exercise 11. Revise the main principles of word building in English. Answer the questions.

1.What are the main structural parts of an English word?

2.What are four main methods of word ?

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3.What is derivation? Provide examples of derivates.

4.What types of affixes do you know?

5.What is the difference between a prefix and a suffix?

6.What is compounding? Provide examples of compounds.

7.What is conversion? Provide examples.

8.What is abbreviation? Provide example.

9.What types of abbreviated words do you know?

Exercise 12. Provide as many cognates as possible.

Estimate, predict, sum, increase, discuss, exact, value, perform, observe.

Exercise 13. Using the AWL, translate the following into English.

1.Исследовать, исследование, исследователь, исследовательский, поддающийся исследованию, технопарк, научная статья, научный сотрудник, исследовательский проект, перспективы исследований.

2.Анализ, анализировать, аналитик, аналитический, поддающийся анализу, анализируемость, всесторонний анализ, детальный анализ, ретроспективный анализ.

3.Точный, неточный, точность, точно, точные выводы, точный

ивсесторонний анализ, точная оценка, точность наблюдения.

4.Аргументировать, приводить доводы; спорный; довод, аргумент; аргументация, спор; спорно, вероятно, возможно; дискуссионный, доказательный; спорное утверждение; спорный вопрос; ясность аргументации; дискуссионный вопрос; аргументативное эссе.

Nouns vs. verbs in academic writing

Nominalization refers to the process of producing a noun from another part of speech via the addition of derivational affixes. For example, develop – development, translate – translation etc. Academic authors frequently use nominalizations to provide useful links back to the previous sentences in order to express an idea or a concept more precisely.

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For example,

They are developing a new course to teach academic vocabulary. The method development can take months.

In the first sentence we use the verb develop and nominalize it (development) to refer back to the previous sentence, thus linking two sentences.

On the other hand, English often displays a strong tendency to prefer verbal rather than nominal constructions. Consider the following four sentences:

(1)All our efforts are aimed at the improvement of quality.

(2)All our efforts are aimed the improving of quality.

(3)All our efforts are aimed at improving quality.

(4)All our efforts aim to improve quality.

The four sentences represent a gradation: from more formal to less formal, and from nominal to verbal structures. Sentence (1) represents a style of writing that is frequently rely to be alien to English idiom.

Academic writing should be credible and specific. We show the reader our data and we show our readers our logic with a sentence showing logic and action is the job of verbs. Good writers use verbs well, because English is a verb-driven language.

Once recognized, nominalization is easy to correct. Whenever you see general-purpose verbs, such as carry out, perform, undertake or conduct, you have to substitute it with an action verb. Turning the name of the activity back into a verb, preferably in the active voice, will make the sentence more direct and easier to read. Here are some tips to revise nominalizations.

1.Whenthenominalizationfollowsageneralpurposeverb,change it to an action verb.

The police conducted an investigation of the matter. – The police investigated the matter.

2. When a nominalization follows there is / are, change the nominalization into a verb and find the subject.

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There was considerable erosion of the land from the floods. – The floods considerably eroded the land.

3. When the nominalization is the subject of a general purpose verb, change the nominalization to a verb and find a new subject.

Our intention is to audit the records of the program. – We intend to audit the records of the program.

4. When you find two nominalizations in a row, make at least the first into a verb, then either leave the second as it is or turn it into a verb in a clause beginning with how or why.

There was first a review of the evolution of the dorsal fin. – First, she reviewed the evolution of the dorsal fin. Or: First, she reviewed how the dorsal fin evolved.

Nominalizations lead to another problem, the excessive use of the preposition “of”. For example,

The knowledge of the principles of correct usage of a language is very important.

The sentence contains four nouns linked by the preposition “of” and one auxiliary verb “is”. Such sentence is regarded to be alien to English idiom and should be revised. Here are two possibilities:

In any language it is very important to know the principles that determine correctness of usage.

Knowing the principles determining correct usage is very important in any language.

Exercise 14. Rewrite the sentences using verbal structures to replace the underlined words.

Example: The existence of this tendency is beyond all doubt. – It is beyond all doubt that this tendency exists.

1.An answer to this question is not simple.

2.Our foundation invites you to participation in a correspondence course.

3.TV is not only an ideal source of information by the easiest way of manipulation as well.

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