Noun groups, their elements and their syntactic function in the clause: an analysis of abstracts of scientific texts in English

Resumo

This paper is aimed at showing the results of a research on English Syntax, concerning the structure of noun groups (NGs) and their syntactic function in the clause. The study is part of a broader research on how NGs are empirically manifested in the English language, particularly in academic texts.It sets off to investigate the NG in English from a theoretical perspective, particularly afunctional-descriptive approach to language. The theoretical background of the research is based on Chafe (1994), Downing and Locke (2006) and Halliday (2004). In order to accomplish the objective in focus, NGs of five scientific abstracts were selected and analyzed. They were classified according to their complexity in terms of the presence of non-nuclear elements (determiner, pre-modifier and post-modifier) and according to their syntactic functions (subject, direct object and completive in prepositional groups) in the clause above them. The main results were that the first most common structure was the one with the head, pre- or post-modifier and the determiner as optional, and that, for the second most common, the subjects were less complex than the objects. This points to the fact that NGs at Direct Object, for instance, tend to display a more complex structure when compared to the NGs realizing Subject. We speculate that this may be due to the text genre and mainly to the fact that Subjects are usually light, whereas objects tend to carry heavier information that usually requires more language complexity in order to be conveyed.