Page 222 - English for Writing Research Papers

207

original version (ov) revised version (rv)
Educational software specifi cation Trends in defining the specifi cations for

defi nitions trends educational software
Examining narrative cinema fi ction and Examining the boundaries between fi ction and
fact boundaries fact in narrative cinema
New archaeological research and New technologies for research and teaching in
teaching technologies archaeology

What the RVs highlight is that the order of the nouns has been reversed. In the OVs

there is a series of nouns that premodify (describe) the final noun. However, these
final nouns ( trends, boundaries, technologies ) are not usually used in English in

combination with another noun.
Melanie Bell, who researches English language at the University of Cambridge,
comments:
Although native speakers string nouns together, especially when coining terms in technical
language, it’s probably safer to avoid creating multiword compounds of more than two, or per-
haps three, words. English tends to be clearer if nouns are not used in a long string but are bro-
ken up by the use of prepositions and verbs that show how the nouns are related to one another.

The OVs are examples of concatenations of nouns, and the RVs represent phrasal
options. By ‘coining terms’ Bell means creating a combination of nouns that has
never existed before: specifi cation defi nitions trends and fact boundaries are exam-
ples of such combinations. The difference between a native speaker and a non-
native speaker, is that a native speaker intuitively knows whether a combination
sounds right or not, whereas a non-native rarely has this ability. If you are not sure
whether a combination exists or not, then check with Google Scholar. If you are
combining relatively common words (including technical words) and you don’t get
at least 100,000 returns, there is a good chance that your combination of nouns does
not exist. In such cases you can simply adopt the method highlighted in the RVs.
This method involves using verbs (Sect. 12.6 ) and prepositions (Sect. 12.3 ).

However, strings of nouns and adjectives must be used if they are names of pieces
of equipment or procedures. Here are some examples taken from the Methods sec-
tion of three papers.

An Oxford Link SATW ultra-thin window EDX detector

A Hitachi S3500N environmental scanning electron microscope
A recently developed reverse Monte Carlo quantifi cation method

For more on this topic see 2.15 and 2.16 .