Acceso usuarios
Santiago, Chile
The present investigation proposes that the nominalization index (the ratio of nouns to verbs in a given text) successfully predicts the academic-scientific character of a text. The results of a computer-assisted analysis of a 12.7 million word corpus show that this index is sensitive to the opposition between scientific/academic texts and letters to the editor/journalistic texts. It is likewise sensitive to the differences between applied sciences, natural sciences, social sciences and humanities texts, although there is a certain amount of overlap between these last two. When contrasting expert and novice texts, the index is only sensitive in the case of applied and natural sciences. It is suggested that the greater relative occurrence of nouns could be related to the construction of an object-centric depersonalized discourse in which the vicissitudes of actors'mental processes are believed to be irrelevant in the interpretation of discourse-coherence relationships.
