(2007) ESOP: THE USE OF NOUNS IN SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS IN PHYSICS

摘要

The communicative approach to language learning has recently attracted linguists' interest inexamining all genres of scientific writing. One of the major types of scientific text is a research article,which is characterized by both external and internal compositional consistency. As a rule, the overallcontent of the article, its structure, aim and objectives, are presented in the introduction section, whichtend to a standard compositional model congruent with its communicative functions: to introduce,comment on the previous research, prepare the reader for adequate understanding, give a briefdescription of the author's contribution to the study of the problem area. These communicationalimplications urge the authors to appropriately select the language items.This article highlights the interrelation between the communicative functions of the introduction and theauthors' use of substantives in research articles in physics. This paper outlines the results of theresearch aimed at the analysis of recurring nouns in the introductory texts of 60 research articles onphysics based on the content structure of the text. As basic semantic loading of a sentence liesprimarily upon the subject of the sentence, our research was limited to the nouns functioning as asubject.The study showed that recurring nouns in the introduction of research articles communicate thegeneral purpose of this section and could be classified into 15 sub-groups. This classification wasdeveloped in line with the micro-situations occurring in scientific activity presented by M. Vorobyeva(1986). Finally, these 15 subgroups of nouns structure the main components of the communicativemodel of the introduction section.In EAP/ESOP teaching context, this lexical modelling contribute to advancing students' readingcomprehension and scientific writing proficiency.