Emotive Lexis and a Scholar’s Hypothetical Portrait

The article is devoted to emotive connotations that arise in scientific articles. The author undertakes to investigate to what degree scholars are able to express their feelings and emotions in their writing. The research is carried out in several steps and includes a survey among peer educators to forecast the range of possible emotions that a scholar may experience while writing, lexicographical research to define and expand the range of lexical items verbalizing emotions, and empirical investigation is done to calculate the frequency of emotional lexis. The results demonstrate that being emotional is implicit in an author’s written speech. The most frequently expressed emotion in academic writing is expectation/hope and this is logically justified as such a high frequency reflects the hypothetical nature of academic studies. Two aspects were detected in the category ‘expectation/hope’ – means of expressing a more pragmatic and direct propositions and means of mitigating standpoints. The other groups of emotions lag significantly behind, e.g. being confident, disappointed, in doubt, or surprised. The findings are used to define a ‘hypothetical portrait’ of an average author of a scientific text. The paper also investigates the range and frequency of semes verbalizing emotions within each category and this allows for compiling a list of ‘key’ vocabulary items that can be used in teaching academic writing.