Academic Paper Titles and Their Dominating Patterns: a Russian-English Perspective

Abstract

The article shows the key role that academic paper titles play in presenting paper contents and burden, and demonstrates cultural and linguistic differences between the academic style in Russian and in English. The author explains the way the academic style is connected with language's grammatical structure and its culturespecific communicative patterns, and illustrates that the prevailing paper titles' patterns are predetermined by academic style dominants in a particular language.The fundamental difference in paper titles organization in Russian and English academic style is that in Russian the prevailing pattern in naming a paper has traditionally been an extended single noun group with several prepositional and postpositional subordinates, predominantly in Genitive. In English, on the contrary, the title in most cases consists in two parts connected by a column, full stop, conjunction or a preposition. That is why there is a communicative asymmetry in academic paper titles' verbalization principles in Russian and in English, as these principles are mostly language specific and have their own dominating linguistic patterns. It is also explicated that there is an asymmetry between academic paper titles in Russian and in English not only in their structure and organization, but in lexicon as well. That is why paper titles translated word-for-word from Russian into English often fail to map standard stylistic patterns characteristic to academic English. There are some comments as well on a rather new pattern in titling academic papers across languages. It has to do with using various expressive stylistic means, which never fail to attract peers' attention. There are also some comments on using "translator's false friends" in rendering academic paper titles from Russian into English, particularly by native Russian speakers.The research is based on extensive linguistic corpus data (10 000 paper titles authored by native Russian and English speakers), has practical implications and guidelines, as well as proposes some topical theoretical interpretations concerning its subject matter. Институт языкознания РАН, г. Москва, РоссияАннотация. В статье показана ключевая роль названия научного текста в отражении его содержания и предназначения. Указаны культурно и лингвистически обусловленные различия в научной речи на русском и английском языках, а также связь научного стиля со строением языка и доминирующими в нем моделями названий научных текстов.На основе анализа специально созданного представительного лингвистического корпуса названий современных аутентичных научных текстов на русском и английском языках (1980-2017 гг.) объемом свыше

Developing Professional Skills in Academic Writing With Postgraduate Students

“…Множество различий разного уровня были зафиксированы И. Б. Короткиной в педагогическом дискурсе 1 . В дополнение исследование Н. К. Рябцевой позволило обозначить различия между заголовками научных статей, написанных русскоязычными и международными авторами, и сформулировать основные принципы перевода названия статей на английский язык [14].…”

“…Кроме того, глубокое погружение в научную речь на родном языке, при отсутствии целенаправленного обучения таковой на иностранном языке, приводит к переносу норм научного стиля из родного языка в иностранный текст. Проблема языкового переноса, или языковой интерференции, подчеркивается многими российскими учеными [11][12][13][14]. Эти основания позволяют допустить, что большинство начинающих инженеров-исследователей различных специализаций имеют много общего в стратегии создания научного текста.…”

Corpus-based Contrastive Study of Discursive Strategy of Construing Interpersonal Relations in English Language Academic Discurse

“…The Russian academic style uses rather extended titles with (multiple) abstract nouns, genitive constructions, etc., incorporated into a single noun group whereas the English academic style prefers a two-part title pattern, which, in its turn, employs the and-conjunction, a column, non-finite forms of the verb, prepositions, interrogative constructions, etc. (Riabtseva, 2018). In a comprehensive contrastive research of two broad classes of discourse markers, namely organisers and regulators, E.Yu.…”