ANALYSIS OF METASTRUCTURE FUNCTIONS IN SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL DISCOURSE (ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE MATERIAL)

The article deals with the functions of metastructures in the scientific and technical discourse on thematerial of English scientific articles (journal Robotics) freely available on the Internet applying the method of thecorpus-oriented discourse analysis. The relevance of the work is due to the lack of the researches on metastructuresin the mentioned above discourse type especially using the corpus-based approach. The instrument AntConc is usedto perform more accurate statistic analysis of the metastructure functions frequency. Moreover, AntConc provides thepossibility to figure out lexics variation of the metastructure in the certain function. In this regard, the purpose of thearticle is to identify and describe metastructures functions in the scientific and technical discourse. All the functions areclassified into seven groups: interpretation function, evaluation function, confirmation of the facts mentioned above byillustration, text formation function, details reduction function, dialogue function and comment function. The article concludes that the most and the least frequent usage of metastructures in the certain function is explained by the authors’ intentions to follow the reader’s reception process and by the recipient’s competence as well.