Lexical signals in the generic structure of popular scientific reports

Abstract

An attempt is made in this work is to define the Lexical signals in generic structure of popular scientific reports (PSR). Thirty-five popular scientific articles were examined using the structure bades on Nwogu's structure (1991) to indicate the schema by which the information in PSRs is organized. The results obtained from the analysis indicate that the schema is made up by eight schematic structures called "moves" each fulfilling a concrete purpose and also containing "Constituent Elements ". In this work the constituent element refers to the lexical signal, i.e. the most frequent lexical word in a concrete move, whose function is based on the purpose of that move.