Promotional adjectives in grant proposal abstracts: a corpus study

Вестник Волгоградского государственного университета. Серия 2: Языкознание. 2025. Vol. 24. No. 6. P. 58–67.

Dmitriy S. Tulyakov, Tatiana M. Permyakova, Ekaterina A. Balezina

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.

Keywords: гуманитарные науки, социальные науки, естественные науки, корпусная лингвистика, corpus linguistics, natural sciences, лингвистический корпус, linguistic corpus, Humanities, Social Sciences, promotional adjectives, grant proposal abstracts, заявки на получение грантов, прилагательные продвижения

Publication based on the results of: Самопродвижение и критичность в академической профессиональной коммуникации (2025)