Lexical grammatical structure of dentistry research article titles written in Spanish

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the syntactic structure and rhetorical function of 250 dentistry research articles titles in Spanish. Length, punctuation, lexical-grammatical structure, and styles of titles were examined qualitatively and quantitatively. It was found an average of 15.5 words per title; three types of titles: nominal (78%), compound (21.2%) and full-sentence titles (0.8%). Titles without punctuation predominated. 21.2% used colon and period to form compound titles predominated. It was observed that compound titles combine two rhetorical components: topic-method and topic-description. Uni-head nominal constructions (using mainly non-discipline-specific nouns) using prepositional phrases (100%), adjectives (29%), non-personal verbal phrases (28%) and relative clauses (4.4%) as postmodifiers predominated.