Tulyakov D.S., Permyakova T.M., Balezina E.A. Promotional Adjectives in Grant Proposal Abstracts: A Corpus Study
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2025.6.5
Dmitriy S. Tulyakov
Candidate of Sciences (Philology), Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, HSE University, Perm, Russia
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https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3272-6925
Tatiana M. Permyakova
Doctor of Sciences (Philology), Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, HSE University, Perm, Russia
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https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4960-5038
Ekaterina A. Balezina
Candidate of Sciences (Sociology), Associate Professor, Department of Management, HSE University, Perm, Russia
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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2456-0913
Abstract. By effectively integrating promotional discourse into grant proposal abstracts, researchers can more compellingly present their ideas and increase their chances of securing funding. Implications of promotional adjectives in grant writing might differ across various research fields. This study aims to explore the use of promotional adjectives in abstracts of research grant proposals in six research fields, ranging from arts and humanities to natural sciences, to confirm the hypothesis that the frequencies of promotional adjectives in abstracts across disciplines and the proportion of discipline-specific and general promotional adjectives within disciplines vary considerably. 148 promotional adjectives in six disciplinary corpora of abstracts of research grant proposals funded by UK Research and Innovation in 2012–2023 (over 13 million words, 28,551 texts) were examined. The results show that general promotional adjectives in grant proposal abstracts demonstrate high frequency regardless of the genre and the discipline; discipline-specific adjectives are more likely to be presented in Arts and Humanities, Engineering and Physics, and Economics and Social Sciences than in Natural Sciences. The use of promotional adjectives is consistent, yet distinct, in all disciplines. The results of the study may have implications for disciplinary researchers' grant writing practices and in teaching English for Academic Purposes.
Key words: grant proposal abstracts, linguistic corpus, corpus linguistics, promotional adjectives, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Humanities.
Citation. Tulyakov D.S., Permyakova T.M., Balezina E.A. Promotional Adjectives in Grant Proposal Abstracts: A Corpus Study. Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Seriya 2. Yazykoznanie [Science Journal of Volgograd State University. Linguistics], 2025, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 58-67. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/ jvolsu2.2025.6.5
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