Interestingly: the sentence adverbs of PubMed Central by Neil Saunders.
From the post:
Scientific writing – by which I mean journal articles – is a strange business, full of arcane rules and conventions with origins that no-one remembers but to which everyone adheres.
I’ve always been amused by one particular convention: the sentence adverb. Used with a comma to make a point at the start of a sentence, as in these examples:
Surprisingly, we find that the execution of karyokinesis and cytokinesis is timely…
Grossly, the tumor is well circumscribed with fibrous capsule…
Correspondingly, the short-term Smad7 gene expression is graded…The example that always makes me smile is interestingly. “This is interesting. You may not have realised that. So I said interestingly, just to make it clear.”
With that in mind, let’s go looking for sentence adverbs in article abstracts.
Great example of parsing PubMed abstracts (~47 GB uncompressed) for adverbs, with Ruby and analyzing the results with R.
I have something similar coming up this weekend. Searching a standards corpus for keyword usage consistency.
I think I know the answer but having a file with every instance will be a lot more convincing. 😉
What tools do you use to explore texts?