Aproximación al análisis de los nombres generales y su función encapsuladora en el discurso científico

Abstract

This study investigates a lexical type of Spanish nouns that are characterized by a high degree of ge-nericity and a great condensing capacity, features that can convert them into textual cohesion resources, frequently used in many specific discourses. The condensing function of general nouns, consisting in encapsulating a predicative content, can be reinforced by some desired discursive effect on the part of the author who can impose to the reader a particular assessment of the facts described in the text. Our goal is to measure the contribution of nominal encapsulators to the cohesion of scientific texts and their specific discursive character, supposedly objective and depersonalized. Starting from its six semantic classes pro-posed by Schmid (2000), we subject to an empirical analysis our manual corpus composed of texts from various scientific disciplines, in order to establish some variables: distribution of the encapsulators in the generic subtypes of the corpus and in all parts of the text.

Keywords

• general nouns
• nominal encapsulation
• scientific discourse
• lexical cohesion
• predicative condensation