The Use of Verbs in Research Articles: Corpus Analysis for Scientific Writing and Translation

Abstract

This article describes the results of a study of the use of verbs in the different sections of medical research articles. A corpus of 30 POS-tagged texts was used. The verbs were classified according to their meaning in lexical domains. Results show that the lexical domains are distributed differently in each section of the article. The comparison of these results with those obtained by López Rodríguez (2002) sheds light on the complex relationship between a research article and its abstract. The objective is to learn more about the lexical characteristics of medical English. A proposal is also made for using these results in a more practical manner, for example to enrich an electronic manual with information that could assist professionals and translators with the writing and translation of medical research articles.