Original scientific paper

Contrastive study of lexical cohesive devices in chemical engineering papers in English and Serbian

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Abstract

This study aims to conduct a contrastive analysis of the use of lexical cohesive devices in research articles written in English and in Serbian. The analysis was conducted on a sample of twenty abstracts of English and Serbian research articles in the field of chemical engineering. The model taken as the framework for this analysis was the one proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976), which describes six types of lexical cohesive devices, namely the use of repetition, synonyms (including hyponyms), superordinates, general words and collocations. The results revealed that Serbian texts rely more on lexical cohesion in achieving coherence since Serbian abstracts had a significantly higher density of total lexical cohesive devices compared to those written in English. Every subcategory of lexical cohesive devices also had greater density in Serbian abstracts compared to English abstracts, with the smallest difference present in repetitions. The use of superordinates was, however, significantly higher in Serbian texts. The two corpora had the same distribution of individual reiteration subtypes, with the highest percentage of repetition, followed by synonymy, and then superordinates. The results obtained highlight the need for non-native English authors to master the various strategies of English scientific writing, ensuring greater coherence and readability of research paper abstracts, and effectiveness in academic communication.

Keywords: lexical cohesion, discourse analysis, contrastive analysis, academic writing, research paper abstracts, chemical engineering