Abstract:

The communicative approach to language learning has recently attracted linguists’ interest in examining all genres of scientific writing. One of the major types of scientific text is a research article, which is characterized by both external and internal compositional consistency. As a rule, the overall content of the article, its structure, aim and objectives, are presented in the introduction section, which tend to have a standard compositional model congruent with its communicative functions: to introduce, comment on the previous research, prepare the reader for adequate understanding, give a brief description of the author's contribution to the study of the problem area. These communicational implications urge the authors to appropriately select the language items.

This article highlights the interrelation between the communicative functions of the introduction and the authors’ use of substantives in research articles in physics. This paper outlines the results of the research aimed at the analysis of recurring nouns in the introductory texts of 60 research articles on physics based on the content structure of the text. As basic semantic loading of a sentence lies primarily upon the subject of the sentence, our research was limited to the nouns functioning as a subject.

The study showed that recurring nouns in the introduction of research articles communicate the general purpose of this section and could be classified into 15 subgroups. This classification was developed in line with the micro-situations occurring in scientific activity presented by M. Vorobyeva (1986). Finally, these 15 subgroups of nouns structure the main components of the communicative model of the introduction section.

In EAP/ESOP teaching context, this lexical modelling contribute to advancing students’ reading comprehension and scientific writing proficiency.

Keywords:

English for academic purposes (EAP), academic writing, scientific writing, scientific genre.