First person

http://bit.ly/maelt_1st_pers

In conversation and fiction, most verbs occur with animate subjects: someone does something. But in academic prose, there is a very high proportion of verbs with inanimate subjects, very often abstract nouns. The use of first person, I and we, has long been controversial. An elegant way of avoiding it in many cases during a text is making a thing the agent/performer of an action instead of the author of the paper, who is usually the researcher as well.

These four sentences from the MU FI Corpus exemplify some inanimate subjects of suggest.

• • The rest of this paper suggests corresponding features for the subclass of services, called workflow services.

  • The fact that such an approach works, suggests that even for supervised learning, information outside ~P may be relevant .

  • The fact that this occurs for all the representations suggests that it is a proper feature.

  • From a conceptual development point of view, this suggests that complex types are in fact learned later than simple or unified types.

According to LGSWE (book review here), in academic writing, about 60% of the uses of these verbs have inanimate subjects.

Causative verbs: cause enable permit require help let allow force

Occurrence verbs: become change happen develop grow increase occur

Existence verbs

be seem appear

exist live stay

contain include involve represent

In academic writing, about 30% of the uses of normal activity verbs have inanimate subjects and for communication verbs it is about 20%. Mental verbs come in at about 10%.

The following verbs are particularly prone to taking an inanimate subject:

apply come give lead make produce provide show take suggest mean prove.