Quantitative Analysis on action and men
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF ACTION AND MENTAL VERBS
Quantitative Analysis of Action and Mental verbs in Instructive and Argumentative texts: a Comparative Review
Fanny Casanova
Vanessa Garrido
Javiera Muñoz
Nicole Muñoz
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Grammar And Text
November 3th, 2014
1
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF ACTION AND MENTAL VERBS
Abstract
Our research consisted first on identifying mainly the mental and action verbs, basing the classification on Halliday‟s (2004) theory, in two texts belonging to the genre of instructing: Instructions to Climb a Staircase by Julio Cortázar and a recipe retrieved from the internet; and other two texts representing the argumentative genre: Why Go Vegan? and
Why Learn English, both found on the internet. As part of our taxonomy we also included relational, modal and auxiliary verbs in the quantification to determine their frequency of occurrence throughout the texts. Secondly we correlated those findings with the particular characteristics of each text according to Knapp and Watkins‟ (2005), for instance it was expected to find more use of action verbs in the two instructive texts and a higher frequency of mental verbs in the argumentative texts. As a fundamental result we found both genres do present the frequency of mental and action verbs expected 90% of the mental verbs in argumentative genre and the 69% of the total amount of action verbs in the instructional texts in instructing. Besides the fact that the most frequent verb types are action and mental, relational verbs are also found in a considerably percentage, and as a projection we propose to analyze relational verbs in texts that present a narrative structure but also take part of the same genres we compared.
Action verbs - Argumentative - Instructive - Mental verbs
2
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF ACTION AND MENTAL VERBS
3
Index
I.
Introduction
4
Objectives - Methodology - Corpus Description
6
III.
Theoretical Framework
8
IV.
Analysis and Results
Quantitative Analysis of Action and Mental verbs in Instructive and Argumentative texts: a Comparative Review
Fanny Casanova
Vanessa Garrido
Javiera Muñoz
Nicole Muñoz
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Grammar And Text
November 3th, 2014
1
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF ACTION AND MENTAL VERBS
Abstract
Our research consisted first on identifying mainly the mental and action verbs, basing the classification on Halliday‟s (2004) theory, in two texts belonging to the genre of instructing: Instructions to Climb a Staircase by Julio Cortázar and a recipe retrieved from the internet; and other two texts representing the argumentative genre: Why Go Vegan? and
Why Learn English, both found on the internet. As part of our taxonomy we also included relational, modal and auxiliary verbs in the quantification to determine their frequency of occurrence throughout the texts. Secondly we correlated those findings with the particular characteristics of each text according to Knapp and Watkins‟ (2005), for instance it was expected to find more use of action verbs in the two instructive texts and a higher frequency of mental verbs in the argumentative texts. As a fundamental result we found both genres do present the frequency of mental and action verbs expected 90% of the mental verbs in argumentative genre and the 69% of the total amount of action verbs in the instructional texts in instructing. Besides the fact that the most frequent verb types are action and mental, relational verbs are also found in a considerably percentage, and as a projection we propose to analyze relational verbs in texts that present a narrative structure but also take part of the same genres we compared.
Action verbs - Argumentative - Instructive - Mental verbs
2
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF ACTION AND MENTAL VERBS
3
Index
I.
Introduction
4
Objectives - Methodology - Corpus Description
6
III.
Theoretical Framework
8
IV.
Analysis and Results
References: Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English Halliday, M., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar (3rd ed.). Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Knapp, P., & Watkins, M. (2005). Genre, text, grammar: Technologies for teaching and assessing writing