Negative terms in biology

Abstract

Studies on the nature and processing of negative terms and statements have been carried out from different angles. They have focused mainly on isolated statements. The purpose of the work reported in this paper was to study negative terms in the discourse of academic articles. The distribution of these terms (620) in Biology research reports was obtained and the functions of negatives in the rethorical sections of one of the articles
were analyzed according to the categories proposed by Crombie (1985); Castaños (1986) and Van Dijk (1983). The results are taken as evidence of the importance of negation to create or modify knowledge in the context of a research report.