Una caracterización morfológica de sustantivos en textos científicos

Resumen

A morphological characterization of nouns in scientific texts

The purpose of this article is to determine to if the presence of specialised vocabulary coincides with the presence of complex morphology in nouns. In doing so, it is necessary to answer tw questions: what characterizes the nouns in so-called scientific texts morphologically, and whether these nouns are different from the nouns used in non-scientific texts. Through a morphological analysis and comparison of nouns in a sample of articles, partly from scientific specialized journals, partly from non-scientific magazines of popular science, it is demonstrated that no significant difference occur regarding the frequency and use of suffixes within the two genres. Except from a slightly more frequent use of abstract suffixes within the words of scientific texts there hardly seems to be any difference in complexity regarding the nouns used in scientific and non-scientific texts.

Key words: scientific language; nouns; word-formation; prefixes; suffixes-