Дискурсивно-стилистический анализ английской письменной научной речи. Учебное пособие

4.It is enough to get on a bus to be a witness of many discussions about politics.

5.The purpose of the course is the preparation of the students for a conscious and critical use of the language.

6.Such a man is an unsuitable representative of a country and its people.

7.Another mistake often made by parents islack of trustin children.

8.Agood teacher must be patient, as the necessity of repeating the same information several times over is quite common in this job.

9.Unfortunately some teenagers stop their development at the stage of adolescence.

10.For those people who do not happen to be the lucky owners of a car, trains are the easiest and quickest means of travelling.

11.The improvement and more intensive utilization of the railways would have the effect of a significant decrease in traffic congestion.

Exercise 15. Rewrite the following sentences using verbal structures to replace or modify the underlined words.

1.One shortcoming of globalization is the danger of domination of small countries by multinational concerns.

2.Ateacher must be capable of fair judgement of students as individuals.

3.Such problems are a consequence of unawareness of the full significance of the situation.

4.The factors determining life expectancy can easily be identified by means of a comparisonof the present century with former epochs.

5.The topic of this essay isthe computer’s invasion of every sphere of our private domain.

6.With the decline of established values people seem to have lost the feeling of the necessity of doing good deeds.

7.The incredible sharpness of the senses of cats makes them react to paranormal phenomena.

8.We run a serious risk of a loss of our traditional, rather conservative values.

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9. The new developments in archaeology resulted in the consideration of the possibility of coexistence of groups of people as reflected through numerous ancient cultures.

Synonyms and confusing pairs

Academic writing aims at logical and accurate representation of scientific ideas; therefore, a writer should be accurate and careful in choosing the right word from the range of synonyms or from a pair of words which tend to be confused (confusing pairs). Synonyms usually have different shades of meaning or different stylistic value. For example, synonyms determine and define have the following meanings:

Determine, v., tr. If you determine something, you decide it or settle it. The date of the match is yet to be determined.

Also: If you determine something, you calculate precisely. … to determine a ship’s longitude / position / latitude by dead-reckoning.

Define, v., tr. If you define a word or expression, you explain its meaning. My dictionary defines “crisis” as a “turning point”.

Certain common words cause confusion because they have similar but distinct spellings and meanings:

The drought affected the wheat harvest in Australia.

An immediate effect of the price rise was a fall in demand. “Affect” is a verb, while “effect” is commonly used as a noun.

Exercise 16. Explain the difference between the following words. Refer to dictionaries if necessary (for example, English Oxford Dictionary https://en.oxforddictionaries.com). Choose the right word in the following sentences.

a) affect, effect, influence, condition, interest

1.The packaging of products affects / effects / influences whether we will buy the product or not.

2.Many teenage girls are affected / conditioned / interested by photos of skinny models, to the extent that they may become obsessed with losing weight.

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3.Whether teachers have previous experience or training will inevitably affect/condition /influence the way they teach.

4.The choice of what to study at university is strongly conditioned/ influenced / interested by the possibilities of a career.

5.It is believed by some that correction may have a detrimental effect / influence a change on a student’s confidence and may even affect/condition / influence their behavior during lessons.

6.The method chosen was found to affect/condition/interest the performance to the extent that choosing the wrong method inevitably gave catastrophic results. This finding affected/conditioned/interested the researchers, who then went on to repeat the experiment in Japan and Korea, with very different results.

b) allow, enable, permit, let, mean

1.This may be desirable in the long term to allow / let / mean a greater degree of control over the…

2.The paper shows the results of an approach that allows us to extrapolate the data/permits to extrapolate the data/means the data can be extrapolated more easily than with other methods.

3.These governments do not enable / let / permit immigrants to have citizenship.

4.The formulation of this new theory allows to / means we can / permits to obtain a more general expression of the overall transfer function.

5.This kind of behavior is not allowed/enabled/permitted .

6.Her parents allowed / let / permitted her do anything she wanted.

c) argue, claim, pretend

1.We do not argue / claim / pretend to provide a complete solution to this problem.

2.There is no point arguing / claiming / pretending that these problems are likely to disappear in the near future, something needs to be done now.

3.A child has no difficulty in arguing / claiming / pretending that a banana is a telephone.

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4.They argue / claim / pretend that we do not need a government, but that we should be self-governing. However, this line of thinking does not...

5.The children argued / claimed / pretended that they spend many hours a day arguing / claiming / pretending with their parents.

d) assume, hypothesize, suppose

1.Althoughlanguageexpertisehasbeenassumed/hypothesized / supposed to be highest in bilingual children, it has never actually been proved.

2.The problem is that although the students apparently study what they are assumed / hypothesized / supposed to study, the examination itself may not actually test what it is assumed / hypothesized / supposed to test.

3.In this chapter it is assumed / hypothesized / supposed that the reader is familiar with...

4.In the literature it has been assumed / hypothesized / supposed that abnormalities in the connections of white matter pathways may be a fundamental cause of...

5.On this basis, it is assumed / hypothesized / supposed that students will only want to undertake a Ph.D. if they...

6.Students were informed that they were not assumed / hypothesized / supposed to use a dictionary during the exam, however many students nevertheless brought a dictionary with them as they had assumed / hypothesized / supposed that the invigilators would not be strict.

e) attempt, demonstrate, prove, show, test, try, try out

1.Over a period of several weeks, eight methods were attempted / tried / tried out.

2.Specifically, we have demonstrated / proved / tried conclusively that the way we read online is very different from how we read a book.

3.In the foregoing discussion, we have attempted / tried / tried out to outline several lines of evidence suggesting that…

4.In the appendix we prove / show / test that x = y.

5.Now let us demonstrate / prove / test TheoremA. We will deduce it from the recursion relation below.

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6.We showed / tested / tried our hypothesis by interviewing 102 candidates. The results showed that our estimates were almost 100% correct.

7.Figure3demonstrates/proves/showsthesetupoftheapparatus.

8.Several authors have attempted / tried / tried out to resolve this problem, but we believe that…

Exercise 17. Insert an appropriate verb into the spaces.

confirm, demonstrates, emphasized, highlighted, hypothesized, justified, observed, proved, substantiates, widen

1.These tests revealed / showed / ________ that...

2.No significant difference was found / identified / revealed / detected / ________ between...

3.The analysis did not show / reveal / identify / ________ any significant differences between...

4.The importance of accuracy cannot be stressed / ________ too much.

5.This underlines / highlights / stresses / proves / ________ just how important self-identity is.

6.The utility of this apparatus is thus underlined / highlighted / reinforced / ________.

7.These results extend / further / ________ our knowledge of X.

8.This confirms / supports / lends support to / ________ previous findings in the literature...

9.As expected / anticipated / predicted / forecast / ________, our experiments show that...

10.These differences can be explained / accounted for / ________

in part by...

Exercise 18. In each group of verbs, find the two verbs that have a very different meaning from all the others:

1.abide by, acknowledge, adhere to, carry out, comply with, establish, observe, satisfy

2.accomplish, carry out, construct, execute, fabricate, perform

3.acquire, collect, envisage, expect, gain, gather, obtain, procure

4.adopt, employ, exploit, review, survey, use, utilize

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5.agree with, clarify, comment on, concur with, correspond to, fit, match, suit

6.aid, argue, assist, assume, cooperate, help, strengthen, support

7.aim, address, attempt, be oriented to, focus on, postulate, pre-

sume

8.annul, be about, concern, destroy, eradicate, extinguish, nullify

9.confirm, corroborate, highlight, illustrate, point to, show, stress, underline

10.explain,indicate,lendforceto,prove,realize,reinforce,reveal, shape, support

Exercise 19. Read the text. Analyze its linguistic organization.

a)use of academic vocabulary (the frequency and the word building patterns of academic words);

b)use of terminology;

c)use of formal style (refer to the guidelines listed on pp.).

It is widely acknowledged that it is not advisable for language users to learn just single words (Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992; Pawley and Syder 1983; Wray 2002). Lexical competence involves being able to put words together in texts. This requires knowledge of the world, knowledge of a language's syntactic constraints and knowledge of a language's lexical preferences. Knowledge of the world enables language users to distinguish between plausible and semantically anomalous propositions (e.g. learn a language versus *learn an apple). Knowledge of a language's syntactic constraints enables users to discriminate between well-formed strings of words and errors (e.g. give advice versus *give an advice). Knowledge of a language's lexical preferences, in turn, enables users to differentiate between what is acceptable, conventional and idiomatic, and what is not sanctioned by usage (e.g. a penny for your thoughts versus

*a pound for your thoughts; to and fro versus *fro and to; a big mistake versus *a large mistake, and so on).

The latter kind of knowledge embraces a range of interconnected concepts that have confusingly come to be referred to in the literature by a variety of often overlapping terms, such as chunks, collocations, fixed expressions, formulaic language, idioms, lexical bundles,

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multiword units, prefabricated units, set phrases, to name but a few (Howarth 1998; Wray 2002). This is understandable, given the wide body of research from different corners of the world the phenomenon has attracted. The focus of the present study is on collocation, defined here in the Firthian (Firth, 1957) sense of “lexical items occurring [...] with a greater frequency than the law of averages would lead you to expect” (Krishnamurthy 1987, p. 70). According to this definition, collocation can be empirically verified against corpus data. It can include strings of words like auburn hair, where auburn rarely occurs in contexts other than hair, and brown hair, where brown occurs in many other contexts but is nevertheless still exceptionally frequent in the context of hair. Collocation can be contiguous (e.g. carry out research), but also allows for noncontiguous forms (e.g. carry out much-needed research). Collocation can cover semantically more transparent associations between words such as cold weather, strings that include words used in the figurative sense like cold war, and idioms like cold feet.

Ana Frankenberg-Garcia. Investigating the collocations available to EAPwriters // Journal of English forAcademic Purposes 35 (2018)

3. Grammatical features of English academic texts

Word order

English word order is fixed. The structure of a basic English sentence can be represented as follows:

The Basic Sentence

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A sentence with prepositional phrases

The key is to keep the subject, verb, direct object and indirect object as close to each other as possible.

In academic writing the subject occupies the first position in the sentence; however, there may be a choice of several potential subjects.

(1)Particularly interesting for researchers in psycholinguistics is a new tool for measuring response time.

(2)Psycholinguistics offers a new tool for measuring response time.

(3)Response time can be measured with a new tool which is particularly interesting for psycholinguists.

(4)X is a new tool for measuring response time. It is particularly interesting for psycholinguists.

When choosing a subject, it is recommended to select the element which represents the most recent or newest information. Sentence (1) and (2) refer to known concepts psycholinguists and psycholinguistics, so they do not provide any new information for a specialist in the field. Sentence (3) begins with a known concept S3 also begins with a known concept, response time. It is a suitable subject if “response time” is the focus of writing. Sentence (4) is a good choice because it provides new information (about a new tool). Hence, the choice depends on the focus of writing.

If a sentence is quite short, it is better to choose a shorter subject phrase. For example, sentence (2) contains a concise subject and is easier to read than sentence (2).

(1)The most significant values are highlighted in Table 1.

(2)Table 1 highlights the most significant values.

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Furthermore, an academic author should consider the following issues.

1. Use of it and there in the subject phrase.Avoid using impersonal constructions such as it is, there is/are in the beginning of a sentence. Use modal verbs instead or try to reorder the sentence.

It is probable that this is due to poor performance. – This may be due to poor performance.

There are three main vocabulary groups in an academic text. – Vocabulary in an academic textcan be classified into three main groups.

2.Distancebetweenasubjectandapredicate.Keepthesubjectand the verb close to each other.

It is shown that distinguishing the terminological collocations in a separate group of lexical unitsis possible only within a broad approach to the concept of “collocation”, as these word combinations are characterized by varying degree of semantic cohesion of their components.

Better version: ...terminological collocations can be distinguished...

3. Parenthetical information between the subject and the verb. Sentences are much easier to read if they flow logically from step to step, without any deviations.

This sampling method, when it is possible, is useful because it allows...

Betterversion:Whenthissamplingmethodispossible,itallowsus...

Exercise 20. Choose the best sentence (a or b).

(1a) The following are some examples of rare species:

(1b) Examples of rare species are the following:

(2a) Among the factors which influence longevity of seeds, of particular importance are temperature and moisture content.

(2b) Temperature and moisture content are particularly important factors influencing the longevity of seeds.

(4a) However, this operation is only defined for some nouns, which are called countable nouns.

(4b) However, only for some nouns this operation is defined, these nouns are called countable nouns.

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(5a) To do this exercise, you do not need to be able to understand the meaning of the technical words.

(5b) You do not need to be able to understand the meaning of the technical words in order to do this exercise.

Exercise 21. Complete the second sentence so that it means the same as the first.

1.It is possible to use several strategies to achieve these goals. – Several strategies...

2.It is possible with this model to give the actual flow rate. – This model gives...

3.It is certain / sure that the new laws will benefit nuclear research. – The new laws will...

4.It is mandatory to use X. – X is...

5.It is anticipated there will be a rise in stock prices. – A rise in stock prices …

6.It is regretted that no funds will be available for the next academic year. – Unfortunately, …

Exercise 22. Choose the sentence with the reader-friendly word order. Explain your choice.

(1a) We are planning at my department a series of workshops on translation in November this year.

(1b) At my department we are planning in November this year a series of workshops on translation.

(1c)At my department we are planning a series of workshops on translation in November this year.

(2a) I would like to request a delay in submission of my manuscript until the 21st October.

(2b) Until the 21st October I would like to request a delay in submission of my manuscript.

(2c) I would like to request a delay until the 21st October in submission of my manuscript.

(3a) Please find attached a copy of the paper for your convenience. (3b) For your convenience, please find attached a copy of the

paper.

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