The use of verbs in research articles: A corpus analysis

The aim of the study described in this article is to examine the lexical characteristics of medical research articles in English. The article describes the results obtained from the analysis of a corpus of medical texts in which the use of verbs is studied in the different sections of the medical research article. After selecting a corpus of 30 texts and tagging them with a POS Tagger, concordances of verbs were obtained. The verbs were then classified according to their meaning in lexical domains. Results show that the lexical domains are distributed differently in each section of the article, reinforcing the rhetorical functions of each section. A proposal is also made for using these results in a more practical manner, for example to enrich an electronic manual, with information that could assist professionals and translators with the writing and translation of medical research articles.