Domain and genre in sublanguage text: definitional microtexts in three corpora
Marie-Paule Péry-Woodley, Josette Rebeyrolle · 1998
In this paper we outline a shallow grammar of definitions as they occur in technical and scientific texts. We show how visual clues, typography and layout, interact with lexical and syntactic clues to signal a definitional text. Whilst starting from the hypothesis that domain and genre have an impact on the grammar of definitions, we also expect to find stable features, which would make the retrieval of definitions possible in new domains. We illustrate this approach with a comparative study on three texts which differ in terms of domain and genre and we show how it is possible to identify some constraints on variations in the formulation of definitional texts.