Lexical patterning in research articles: Towards a workable summary

Gabriela Zapletalová

Lexical patterning in research articles: Towards a workable summary

Vol.2,No.2(2009)

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The contribution aims to test the methodology based on the concept of lexical cohesion referred to as lexical patterning by Hoey (1991) who proposed the model with the aim to decide (1) how lexis organises text and (2) introduced a framework based on the analysis of lexical patterning for the production of intelligible abridgements or summaries of non-narrative texts. Lexical patterns will be investigated in the genre of argumentative research article that has been chosen as a model type of non-narrative text. The method for revealing lexical patterning has been proposed with the aim to extract essential information and present it in a condensed form that would serve as a kind of comprehensive abstract of the whole text. The reason for producing readable summaries using Hoey’s methodology is quite reasonable and relevant: it is an enormous growth of various types of information sources: there are hundreds of research articles (RAs) that appear every year and it is beyond one’s own limits to access all texts and absorb all information presented. We will test to what extent the resulting summary is workable in the way that it provides the reader with the information whether the original text is worth reading.

Keywords:
lexical cohesion; lexical patterning; research article; summary; text

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