¿Cuán gramaticalmente complejos son los títulos de los artículos científicos en las ciencias naturales?

Abstract

This paper examines a corpus of 150 titles of research articles published between 2010 and 2013 in Anglo-American natural sciences journals (physics, chemistry and biology) in order to determine their lexical density and grammatical and morphosyntactic features. Towards that end, the frequency of present and past participles, prepositions, coordinating and subordinate conjunctions, and the frequency and length of compound words was recorded in each title. The total number of content and function words was also recorded so as to determine title lexical density. ANOVA tests were applied in order to assess whether statistically significant differences in the frequency of the above mentioned variables were detected within and across disciplines and in the whole corpus. Our results showed that, in the three disciplines, the frequency of the past participle is higher than that of the present participle (p = 0,04). They also disclosed that prepositions are the most frequently used function words and that they outnumber coordinating conjunctions (p = 0,02). Compound words were found to be very frequent, especially 2- and 3-word ones. As for title lexical density, it was found to be similar across disciplines (3,1). The only statistically significant cross-disciplinary difference detected was that present participles are more frequently used in chemistry than in biology (p= 0,001). Our findings reflect the complexity of the scientific concepts expressed in natural sciences research article titles. Because titles are frequently the only section of a paper scientists read so as to decide whether to read on or not, we present a few pedagogical tips that could be applied in reading and/or writing ESP courses. DOI: 10.20420/rlfe.2015.0012

Keywords

• Titles
• research papers
• natural sciences
• English
• grammar