Abstract

A SYNTACTICO - SEMANTIC STUDY OF CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN SCIENTIFIC AND NON - SCIENTIFIC TEXTS

Kareem Ali Ramadhan, Asst. Prof. Abdul-Kareem Fadhil Jameel (Ph.D.)

Volume: 8 Issue: 4 2018

Abstract:

In English, there are two types of construction to express causativity: the first isʻlexical causativeʼ in which a verb conveys the notion of ʻcauseʼ and ʻresultʼ, and the second is ʻperiphrastic causativeʼ in which a verb conveys only the notion of ʻcauseʼ. The second type is of special interest to researchers because they directly encode different causal concepts. Two articles of two different disciplines, ʻscientific vs. non-scientificʼ are taken under the investigation to be data of the study.The aim of the study is to investigate syntactic and semantic features of causative constructions, and to discover similarities and differences between scientific articles and non-scientific articles in the employment of causativity. The researcher adopts Song's (1996) syntactic model and Dixon's (2000) semantic model for the analysis. The study shows some general conclusions such as: the class of English causative verbs is open-ended. In addition, the frequency of appearance of causativity is more frequently employed in non-scientific text than those occur in scientific text.A number of pedagogical recommendations and suggestions for further studies are put forward.

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