A cross-disciplinary study of verb boosters in research articles from engineering, medicine and linguistics: frequency and co-text variations
Keywords:
booster, metadiscourse, corpus, medicine, linguistics, engineeringAbstract
The present study looks into the variations in the frequencies and pragmatic functions of the metadiscourse markers known as boosters, and in particular, with regard to their verb forms. Three corpora have been compiled to this end, covering the fields of engineering, medicine and linguistics. The corpora were manually annotated for metadiscourse markers, boosters included, by a group of annotators. A predetermined list was used for annotation, but throughout the annotation process the list was modified to better reflect the use of metadiscourse in the corpora. The raw count of the occurrences of verb boosters shows clear differences between the corpora, which in turn confirms previous studies of this type. However, the range of verbs identified was very similar, pointing to a large overlap among the three. The three top frequency verb boosters also showed a clear overlap for engineering and medicine, but revealed considerable differences with linguistics. This study has been conducted within a research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (FFI2016-77941-P).
Additional Files
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright agreement:
Authors who have a manuscript accepted for publication in this journal agree to the following terms:
Authors will retain their copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication of their work by means of this copyright agreement document, which is subject to the Creative Commons Acknowledgment License that allows third parties to share the work provided that its author and first publication in this journal are indicated.
Authors may adopt other non-exclusive license agreements for distribution of the published version of the work (e.g., depositing it in an institutional repository or publishing it in a monographic volume) as long as the initial publication in this journal is indicated.
Authors are allowed and encouraged to disseminate their work via the internet (e.g., in institutional publications or on their website) before and during the submission process, which can lead to interesting exchanges and increase citations of the published work (read more here).
