Verb types in chemistry research articles: a semantic perspective

Abstract

Semantic verb types in chemistry research articles and their collocational structures have been analysed in order to determine the most highly cooccurring verbal patterns in a specific genre. In order to carry out this study, a selection of 25 articles from specialised journals has been processed with a concordance programme. Pedagogical implications regarding sense choice and the syntactical patterns they select in order to convey a specific sense are discussed in the paper. This paper analyses only the use of the thirty most frequent lexical verbs found in our corpus and is limited to the use of those verbs in the contexts where they have been found.