Ю. А. Филясова. Синтаксические связи в английских названиях технических и экономических научных статей (выборочный сравнительный анализ)

Ю. А. Филясова

(Санкт-Петербург)

Синтаксические связи в английских названиях технических и

экономических научных статей (выборочный сравнительный анализ)

Результаты анализа синтаксических связей в названиях научных статей показывают, что длина названий технических и экономических статей почти одинакова, однако синтаксические связи более сложные в технических заголовках вследствие преобладания подчинительных структур, осложненных многокомпонентными атрибутивными сочетаниями. Названия экономических статей обнаруживают ряд сходств с медийными заголовками статей, такими как предикативная вопросительная структура, наличие стилистических приемов и парцелляция.

Ключевые слова: название, научная статья, словосочетание, синтаксические связи, подчинение, управление, согласование, синтаксическая структура.

INTRODUCTION

Title is a means of efficiently communicating scientific findings to the broad community of scientists in a uniform manner. C. Fox and C. Burns state that titles of manuscripts became marginally longer, broader in focus (less frequent inclusion of genus and species names), and included more humor and subtitles over the period of the study [23, p. 1970]. V. Soler notes that the full-sentence title construction appears as a generic peculiarity of research papers [30, p. 90], though they are quite often found in media context [1, 20, 21].  Z. Li and J. Xu’s findings identified a trend towards longer titles with higher lexical density, an increasing preference for compound constructions over nominal-group and full sentence constructions, and a more prevalent presentation of information about research method/design in addition to the topic in titles over the past four decades. These findings suggest that research article titles appear to be diachronically more informative [25]. Accurate information on the substance of the paper is not enough, a conclusive title presents what the study has established, its specific contribution to the development of knowledge [29, p. 49].

From the practical standpoint, short titles presenting results or conclusions are independently associated with higher citation counts [27]. The presence of humour in titles does not increase citation ratings [28].

J. Hudson’s research of a large corpus of journal articles revealed that (1) the lengths of the titles increase with the number of authors in almost all disciplines, (2) the use of colons and question marks tends to decline with increasing author numbers – although there were a few disciplines, such as economics, where the reverse was evident, (3) papers tend to have more authors than those published earlier, and (4), in some disciplines, the numbers of subsequent citations to papers are higher when the titles ar shorter and when they employ colons but lower when they use question marks [24].

Titles of academic research articles are syntactically represented by phrases of different inherent structure but can also be in the form of a question [18]. J. Cook and D. Plourde found that titles with questions are posed infrequently overall. Further, most titles with questions do not pose yes/no questions. Finally, the few questions that are posed in yes/no terms are actually more often answered with a “yes” than with a “no” [19]. Titles in the form of a complete sentence with the predicate structure are rare, especially in technical context [11; 15; 16; 17; 22]. Hence, the term ‘syntactic construction’ defined as a characteristic formal pattern of syntactic categories or features, usually associated with some meaning and/or discourse function [31] cannot be always applicable to titles.

The basic and most frequently syntactic unit occurred in research article titles is a phrase, or word combination. By definition, a phrase is “a word or words that act as a unit in a clause, such as a noun phrase, a verb phrase, or an adjective phrase, for example in the sentence ‘This road can get very busy’, ‘this road’ is a noun phrase, ‘can get’ is a verb phrase, and ‘very busy’ is an adjective phrase” [26].

A phrase is a word combination of two and more words which form a semantic and grammatical unit, and fulfills the nominative function [2]. V. A. Kochergina classifies phrases into subordinate and coordinative. The main types of logical connections are attributive, completive, predicative and coordinative [8, p. 198–203]. V.V. Gurevich, Y.A. Rozhdestvensky and A.V. Blinov identify coordination, subordination and parataxis as the basic types of connection between words in a phrase [12, p. 194; 5, p. 160].

Describing types of syntactic relations in phrases, I.P. Ivanova, V.V. Burlakova, G.G. Pocheptsov mention predicative, objective, adverbial and attributive phrases. However, these do not comply with the traditional V.V. Vinogradov’s approach to the phrase. L. S. Barkhudarov, A. M. Mukhin and       L. Hjelmslev introduced one more type – interdependence [6, pp. 114–115], which describes predicative relations.

Complex syntactic units constitute syntactic relations in modern publicist writing: enumerative, contrastive, comparative, conjunctive and consecutive [3]. The occurrence of syntactic units depends on the functional style of text, semantics of lexical components and their grammatical characteristics [7, p. 301].

The complexity of syntactic organization is also seen in fiction where subordinate syntactic clauses cannot be clearly identified as coordination or subordination which causes difficulties for translation into other languages [9, p. 50]. It should be mentioned here that syntagmatic relations are language-specific [13]. For translation purposes the choice of syntactic structures is related to the wide variety of differential argument marking patterns among languages [10].

Analysis of syntactic structures is important for understanding their connection with semantics, communicative focus setting and language representation of situations which are caused by different factors [4]. A number of questions, such as post-verbal infinitive [14], are awaiting further research.

MATERIAL

200 research article titles were selected by means of continuous sampling over the previous seven years: from 2013 till 2019. 100 titles were continuously selected from the technical journal “Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering” and 100 titles – from the economic journal “The Human Resource Management Review”, which are both included in Elsevier’s database.

The aim of this work is to compare syntactic structures of phrases and relations in the titles from two different areas of science: technical, particularly petroleum engineering, and economic, or more specifically, personnel management. The focus of the research is intended to identify whether research article titles have similar or different syntactic organization in these two different spheres.

METHODOLOGY

Firstly, the morphology of the titles was determined from the viewpoint of word classes. For this purpose, the number of nouns (N), adjectives (A), verbs (V), infinitives (Inf), gerunds (G), adverbs (Adv), numerals (num), pronouns (pron), abbreviations (Abbr), question words (QW), prepositions (prep), and their combinations were calculated.

Secondly, the types of syntactic relations were identified in each title in terms of the following structures: coordination (C), parataxis (P), regressive subordination (RS), progressive subordination (PS), accumulation (A), interdependence (I).

Terminologically, syntactic relations in titles can be schematically explained in the following manner:

‒      coordination: N and N; N as N;

‒      parataxis: N, N; V Adv;

‒      regressive subordination: NN; AN; num N; pron N; PII N; PI N;

‒      accumulation: ANN; NNN;

‒      progressive subordination: N prep N; G N; Inf. N;

‒      interdependence: VN and VN (predicative structures in interrogatives and affirmatives).

RESULTS

The total number of words and characters in titles from technical research articles is almost equal to that from economic articles (Table 1). The former are only by 6% longer than the latter.

Table 1. Statistics of the article titles

	Technical	Economic
Words	1340	1255
Characters without spaces	8816	8242
Characters with spaces	10054	9430
Lines	161	154

Morphology. The morphological structures of the technical and economic research article titles demonstrate dramatic dissimilarities in terms of their frequency and composition (Table 2). Technical titles are obviously more complex, containing numerous attributive structures, complicated with accumulative sequences:

          e.g. Gas well water breakthrough time prediction model for high-sulfur gas

reservoirs considering sulfur deposition (NNNNNNN)

          e.g. Application of the empirical mode decomposition and wavelet transform to seismic reflection frequency attenuation analysis (ANNNN)

e.g. Spherical wave attenuation under multiple energy source in viscous fluid-saturated elastic porous media (AAAAN)

The number of titles of economic research articles with complex attributes is considerably lower. The mostly frequently occurring structures are N (151), AN (68) and A (63). NN is three times less frequent than N (47). The following title can serve as an example:

e.g. Structural influences upon coordination and performance in multiteam systems

The number of prepositions is also higher in titles of technical articles than in those of economic articles – 263 vs. 208. The prepositions and, in, of, for, on seem to the most frequent. 

Noteworthily, 69% titles of economic research articles contain colons which can appear in any part of the title – at the beginning, in the middle or at the end.

e.g. Cross-boundary teaming for innovation: Integrating research on teams and knowledge in organizations.

e.g. Teams in transition: An integrative review and synthesis of research on team task transitions and propositions for future research

e.g. The world is not flat: Examining the interactive multidimensionality of culture and virtuality in teams

However, only 12% of technical articles have these in their titles which tend to appear at the end of the title:

e.g. Drag reduction using high molecular weight polyacrylamides during multiphse flow of oil and water: A parametric study

e.g. Heavy oil polymer flooding from laboratory core floods to pilot tests and field applications: Half-century studies

A few titles of research articles on economy were stylistically marked with metaphors and metaphorical periphrasis:

e.g. A bridge over troubled water: Replication, integration and extension of the relationship between HRM practices and organizational performance using moderating meta-analysis

e.g. A theory of work gamification: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something cool?

Titles of economic articles contain more predicative structures, which typically appear in interrogative structures:

e.g. What inferences can and cannot be made on the basis of meta-analysis?

However, there are cases when the interrogative mark is placed after a substantive title:

e.g. Employee voice and work engagement: Macro, meso, and micro-level drivers of convergence?

Table 2. Morphology of the research articles titles

No.	Types of Morphological Structures	Technical context	Economic context
1.	N	851	151
2.	NN	198	47
3.	NNN	49	9
4.	NNNN	8	3
5.	NNNNN	3	0
6.	NNNNNN	1	0
7.	NNNNNNN	1	0
8.	A	350	63
9.	AA	28	10
10.	AAA	3	1
11.	AAAA	2	0
12.	AAAAA	1	0
13.	AN	230	68
14.	AAN	6	7
15.	AAAN	0	1
16.	AAAAN	1	0
17.	ANN	58	17
18.	NAN	7	1
19.	ANNN	14	3
20.	ANNNN	2	0
21.	V	6	22
22.	Inf	9	5
23.	G	35	26
24.	Abbr	10	20
25.	Adv	3	5
26.	pron	1	7
27.	QW	0	5
28.	and	43	74
29.	in	43	30
30.	of	95	64
31.	for	34	16
32.	on	20	12
33.	by	6	0
34.	between	1	3
35.	during	3	0
36.	through	4	0
37.	via	4	0
38.	from	6	7
39.	under	3	0
40.	towards	1	1
41.	over	0	1
42.	?	0	8
43.	:	12	67

         

Syntax. Syntactic relations, similarly to the morphology, appear to be more complex in titles of technical articles (Table 3). Regressive subordination, progressive subordination and accumulation seem to be typical structures in titles of technical research articles. They obviously exceed those in economic articles: RS – by 33%, PS – by 46%, and A – by 54%.

Coordination, however, is more likely to be encountered in titles of research articles on economy. They outnumber those in technical article by 40%. Parataxis rarely occurs in both.

Interdependence being viewed as having predicative nature is foreseeably present in titles of economic research articles since these contain interrogative structures. 

Table 3. Syntax of the research articles titles

No.	Types of Syntactic Structures	Technical context	Economic context
1	Coordination (C)	46	76
2	Parataxis (P)	9	9
3	Regressive subordination (RS)	290	193
4	Progressive subordination (PS)	268	145
5	Interdependence (I)	1	8
6	Accumulation (A)	157	73

CONCLUSION

Subordination is the distinctive feature of all titles. However, titles of technical articles have a higher degree of complexity. Coordination and interdependence (predicative structures) occur in titles of economic articles more often.

Titles of technical research articles have longer attributive structures aggravated by accumulation represented by several adjectives or nouns in the attributive position. In a few cases, these can amount to six or seven attributes. On the contrary, titles of economic research articles usually have simpler syntactic structures in which notion words are interspersed with function words, usually prepositions.

          The presence of complex attributes in titles of technical articles can be explained by the necessity to specify the object of their research, geographical locations [22], materials, methods, which can be simple when expressed via a formula, however complicated when expressed in words. Nowadays, mentioning some results of research in article titles tends to appear more often [27].

The specific feature of titles of economic articles is that they seem to attract attention of potential readers, which is partly proved by the fact that they are represented in the form of interrogative questions. The question in articles does not always imply the negative answer as Betteridge’s Law of Headlines stipulates [19]. The majority of them are subdivided by the colon. As present-day articles are longer than twenty years ago, the latter functions as a means of parceling aimed at facilitating understanding of a long title. Noteworthily, the colon can appear in any part of the title of economic articles – initial, central or final. It can be supposed that titles of economic articles copy news headlines which are abundant in titles from media sources.

The colon can also be encountered in titles of technical articles but not as often as in titles of economic articles. Moreover, it is usually placed at the end of the title, specifying the type of research.

Additionally, titles of economic articles can sometimes contain a metaphor or metaphoric periphrasis which performs an amusement function along with attracting readers’ attention.

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