A Review of Lexico-grammatical Features and their Functions in an Academic Discourse
Keywords:
Lexico-grammatical feature, Communicative function, Academic paper, Research paperAbstract
Successful academic and research writings require correct comprehension of lexical and grammatical uses as a method to understandthe meanings as well as the specific functions in the texts. Woravit Kitjaroenpaiboon and Kanyarat Getkham stated that academic and research writings are not a skill naturally acquired, but needs to be learnt and practiced.. Furthermore, plentiful scholars have proven that some lexical features and grammatical features are found predominantly in the classification not in ordinary language. The lexico-grammatical in this category do not adhere to and are somewhat different from what have been explained in the traditional grammar book. The above statements prove that if one wants to draft an effectively communicative academic or research papers, we should understand how lexico- grammatical function in the particular texts. This paper hence reviews both of related literatures and research studies particularly viewed 23 lexico-grammatical characteristics (i.e. tenses and aspects, passive voice, private, public and suasive verbs, pronouns, downtoners and hedges, possibility, necessity, and prediction modals, synthetic and analytic negations, ‘be’ as main verbs, emphatics, causative subordinations, ‘that’ compliment clauses, wh-clauses, ‘that’ deletion, coordinating conjunctions, sentence relatives, nouns, average word length, type/token ration, predicative and attributive adjectives, adverbs, split auxiliaries, infinitives, gerunds, and participial clauses) in academic and research writings. This review article can benefit researchers who are conducting academic or research papers or others intrigued in investigating specifically underlying communicative functions of a lexico- grammatical feature(s).
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