Verbal phraseology: An analysis of cognitive verbs in linguistics, engineering and medicine academic papers

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to study if the phraseology of cognitive verbs used in academic English reveals different discourse patterns in the specific fields of Linguistics, Engineering and Medicine. The objectives of this study are first the identification of cognitive verb patterns in academic English, second the contrastive analysis of the cognitive verbs patterns used in Linguistics, Engineering and Medicine and finally, the study of the patterns used in the different disciplines of academic English. In this analysis, the taxonomy proposed by Marín-Arrese (2015) to identify evidential expressions, i.e. verbs of mental state or cognitive attitude, is used to identify the cognitive verbs in the corpus. The verbs identified in this category were searched with WordSmith Tools 5.0 and the phraseological units including cognitive verbs were compiled and studied. The frequencies of the verbs with the concordances of the cognitive verbs were analysed and examples discussed. The results extracted from the three different specific fields of knowledge were discussed and the conclusions were drawn.