| English for science and technology has been of great significance owing to its special variety of sentence patterns. Such patterns as questioning, negating, inverting and etc., however, are not considered to be of frequent application because the main purpose of such style of writing is to impart information in technical fields. Whether such patterns are often observed or not, what is the purpose of using them and what is the function in the transmission of information of the whole passage will be studied on the basis of a self-established corpus of technical writings. The patterns covered are discontinuous modification, inversion, omission, negation, passive voice, subjunctive mood and questioning.Discontinuous modification is a grammatical phenomenon in which a modifier is separated with the word it modifies by other elements of the sentence. In scientific writings, which emphasize on the information and accuracy of the language, the functions of this grammatical phenomenon are observed mainly through information development. This research analyzed the functions by language data from scientific writings. The result showed that discontinuous modification can be divided into two kinds according to the cause of this phenomenon: obligatory discontinuous modification and optional one. The former has 4 functions and the latter has 5 functions.Inversion is tending to change the canonical SVO order into the postverbal-subject construction, and make the information packaged in a proper way. Previous studies about inversion are mainly on the usage, classification, rhetorical functions and textual functions. These researches have been done in the literary writing. Since the scientific writing has a great deal information, it usually apply the inversion to balance the information status.The way of information development of ellipsis in EST from sentence level is of great significance. Based on information theory, data collection is carried out and further analysis showed that four information functions (conciseness/ coherence/ emphasis/ contrast) do work in the elliptical sentences. The four functions are distributed with special features for different reasons.As a common grammatical phenomenon in EST, the passives must play a very important role in the information transmission. Summing up the previous researchers' findings, on the basis of statistics from corpus, this paper analyzes detailedly the functions to ensure the objectivity and succinctness, to establish a new topic, to highlight information,to ensure coherence, to make a contrast of information and to make information dramatic respectively, attempting to offer some guidance to reading, writing and translating texts of this genre.Subjunctive is not only used frequently in many kinds of literature works, but is found in the scientific articles at times. Therefore, this article is designed to find out the information function of the subjunctives appearing in these scientific articles and how do the subjunctives are used to impress various information, in order to serve for the scientific scholars to obtain knew knowledge and understand different international articles more clearly; at the same time it also supply great help for the English learners to master and use subjunctives better.The method taken for study in this thesis is empirical with detailed analysis of the corpus established on the magazine Scientific American, one to ten, 2005. The examples are selected randomly to guarantee the objectiveness of the study.The result shows that in EST the above sentence patterns are often to achieve the following functions as introducing information, stating information, converting information, progressing information, stressing information, connecting information, balancing information, predicting information, defining information, generalizing information, terminalizing information and etc. Different patterns have different ways of functioning. |
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