Verbs denoting authorial position: A contrastive Bulgarian-English study of medical research articles

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of a specific discourse category, that of verbs expressing authorial stance in the context of the medical research article. A contrastive study is performed based on two corpora comprising original medical research articles in Bulgarian and English languages, respectively. All the articles have been excerpted from journals with high impact factors covering almost every field of medicine. All data have been processed with the help of word processing programmes to achieve a high level of accuracy. The paper looks into the most frequently used verbs both in the Bulgarian articles and the English ones. The analysis rests on a division of three types of verbs – factive, non-factive and counterfactive ones. Each of the presented verbs is analyzed in the light of this division supported by a number of exemplar sentences extracted from the corpora. One corollary that could be drawn is the fact that Bulgarian authors refrain to a large extent from expressing categorical disagreements which is not so characteristic of the authors in the English-language medical research articles.