Written fluency -- Autumn semester 2004

   Handout 8 - Tuesday, 7 December 2004

   Academic Style: Essays, Papers, Dissertations.

   

   Task 1:

   Look closely at the following extract. What are the syntactic structures used in the initial
   few sentences? How does vocabulary differ from that used in the popular scientific
   style?           

   

                                              ABSTRACT



    Cooking Verbs in Fourteenth-Century English: A Semantic Class and its Syntactic Behaviour

   

   This thesis provides a systematic account of the attested patterns of behaviour of the
   fourteenth-century Cooking Verbs, and compares them to other verbs which are semantically
   similar but syntactically dissimilar, identifying semantic components which distinguish them.

   

   Chapter One presents summaries of lexical semantic approaches used in the study of Middle
   English, and those which have identified the Cooking Verbs of English as a semantic class
   manifesting shared syntactic behaviour (Lehrer 1974; Levin 1993). Chapter Two outlines
   methodological conventions and introduces the sources of data used. It describes the computer
   -readable corpus of fourteenth-century instructional material compiled for this study, and
   specifies the characteristics of the Middle English recipe, identified as a text-type by
   Görlach (1992). Chapter Three introduces syntactic distinctions between Middle English and
   Modern English verb phrases. It then enumerates the syntactic properties identified by Levin
   (1993) as semantically determined in English, and identifies those which are of interest to
   the study at hand.      

   

   Task 2:

   Supply the corresponding Academic English equivalents. Use the previous extract to help you.

   not the same =

   to check =

   meaning of words =

   common =

   to show =

   to give the main points =

   to put together =

   part =

   to list =

   to set / to fix =

   interesting =

   Task 3:

   Translate the following three sentences from a dissertation extract back to English.

   

   Má diplomová práce obhajuje a zkoumá tezi, že pro to, aby mluvčí rozuměl přirozenému jazyku,
   není pouze postačující, nýbrž nutné, aby znal nebo "poznal" pravdivostní přispění slov a
   dalších větných prvků pravdivostním podmínkám celého vyjádření.

   

   

   

   Sémantická kompetence mluvčího bude vysvětlena jako použití uvnitř zastoupené axiomatizované
   teorie pravdivosti pro první jazyk tohoto mluvčího.

   

   

   

   (...)

   Podle pohledu Chomského jsou analytické věty ty věty přirozených jazyků, jež jsou pravdivé
   pokud jde o "souvislosti" mezi sémantickými prvky vrozené jazykové výbavy.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   Task 4:

   Write a short abstract, introduction, or summary (one paragraph) dealing with a specialist
   topic of your interest, e.g. your intended diploma thesis.