Nominal encapsulators: approach from four genres of psychology

Abstract

In this work, the nominal encapsulation mechanisms present in four genres of the academic discourse of Psychology used in the context of the training of undergraduate students at the University of Panama are analyzed. Based on their identification in academic discourse, the aim is to operationally characterize the encapsulating noun phrases and study their behavior and function in the academic genres of the Corpus UPPSIC 2017. To achieve the objectives, noun phrases with a synthesizing function have been categorized. After defining its typology, the syntactic properties of the encapsulating phrase and the diverse nuances of meaning that it contributes to the entities they recover are examined. Subsequently, the different syntactic structures of the referent are differentiated. Among the most relevant results, it stands out that in the discourse of the Exercise Guide genre there is a zero occurrence of intrasentential links of the nominal encapsulation type while, in the Disciplinary Text, Brochure and Research Article genres, a willingness to refer to linguistic structures with more complex morphology and syntax.