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Research in English Studies and FLT
VERBS DENOTING AUTHORIAL POSITION:
A CONTRASTIVE BULGARIAN-ENGLISH STUDY
OF MEDICAL RESEARCH ARTICLES
Ivaylo Yordanov Dagnev
University of Agribusiness and Rural Development –Plovdiv;
Medical College at Medical University, Plovdiv (Bulgaria)
Abstract: The article addresses the issue of a specific discourse category, that of verbs
expressing authorial stance in the context of the medical research article. A contrastive
study is performed based on two corpora comprising original medical research articles
in Bulgarian and English languages, respectively. All the articles have been excerpted
from journals with high impact factors covering almost every field of medicine. All data
have been processed with the help of word processing programmes to achieve a high level
of accuracy. The paper looks into the most frequently used verbs both in the Bulgarian
articles and the English ones. The analysis rests on a division of three types of verbs –
factive, non-factive and counterfactive ones. Each of the presented verbs is analyzed in
the light of this division supported by a number of exemplar sentences extracted from the
corpora. One corollary that could be drawn is the fact that Bulgarian authors refrain to
a large extent from expressing categorical disagreements which is not so characteristic
of the authors in the English-language medical research articles.
Keywords: stance verbs, medical research article, contrastive study, Bulgarian, English
__________________________
About the author: Assoc. Professor Ivaylo Yordanov Dagnev, PhD is an Associate Professor of ESP and
EAP at UARD – Plovdiv and a Senior Lecturer at the Medical College of Medical University in Plovdiv.
He holds a PhD in linguistics and his particular areas of interest include Conceptual Metaphor Theory,
Translation Studies, Cognitive Semantics, Discourse Studies, English for Specific Purposes and English for
Academic Purposes. His PhD title is: Metaphorical Terms in Anatomy: An English-Bulgarian Comparative
Study. He has submitted two habilitation papers. The primary one is entitled: ‘The „Scientific Medical
Article“ Genre in Bulgarian and English Academic Discourse’ and the second one written in English is
entitled: ‘Medical Discourse - Implications of Inverse Translation for the Medical Research Article Genre’.
He has published a book based on his PhD with a title: Metaphors and Shells in Anatomy: Bulgarian-
English Cross Linguistic Study.
e-mail: ivaylo.dagnev@mu-plovdiv.bg ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8287-5307
Copyright © 2023 Ivaylo Yordanov Dagnev
Article history: Received: 1 February 2023; Reviewed: 2 May 2023; Revised: 25 June 2023; Accepted: 27
June 2023; Published: 28 August 2023
This open access article is published and distributed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.
Citation (APA): Dagnev, I. (2023). Verbs denoting authorial position: A contrastive Bulgarian-English study
of medical research articles. Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT, 11(2), 71-82. https://doi.org/10.46687/
FBMA2134.