Adjunct and complement postmodifiers in popular and academic medical articles: a generative corpus-based approach

• Imen Ktari ^[1]
  1. [1] Research Unit in Discourse Analysis, faculty of Arts and Humanities, Sfax, Tunisia
• Localización: Las tecnologías de la información y las comunicaciones: presente y futuro en el análisis de corpus: Actas del III Congreso Internacional de Lingüistica de Corpus / María Luisa Carrió Pastor (ed. lit.), Miguel Ángel Candel Mora (ed. lit.), 2011, ISBN 978-84-694-6225-6, págs. 641-651
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper investigates the use of adjunct and complement postmodifiers in academic and popular medical articles, following a generative approach advocated by Chomsky (1970). It aims to show that this use is affected by the genre of these articles. For this reason, the frequency distributions of these adjunct and complement postmodifiers are studied in a medical corpus of 70.000 words equally divided between academic articles (6 articles) and popular articles (11 articles). The quantitative analysis reveals that adjunct postmodifiers are found to be slightly less frequent than complement postmodifiers within the whole corpus and more importantly that academic articles show a preference of complement postmodifiers at the expense of those acting as adjuncts whereas popular articles display a higher frequency of adjunct postmodifiers. These findings lead to the conclusion that the use of adjunct and complement postmodifiers is relatively genre-affected.