ABSTRACT
This study analyses the variations of the non-literal senses of three verbs of vision: ‘regard’, ‘see’, and ‘view’ in three corpora: English L1 expert writing, English L1 non-expert writing, and English L2 non-expert writing. The non-literal senses of the verbs express major mental activities involved in scientific enquiry and perform important discourse functions in academic texts. Previous studies pointed to areas of difficulty for English L2 non-expert writers with regard to the use of lexical verbs. Taking into account that the usage of literally and non-literally used words differs in terms of their frequencies and lexico-grammatical patterns, this research provides a close scrutiny of the frequency of the non-literal ‘regard’, ‘see’, and ‘view’, as well as the data on the variations of three non-literal senses of ‘see’ together with the syntactic structures used in three corpora. The findings point to cases of overuse and underuse of forms and structures in L2 non-expert writing, but also unveil a complex picture of variations that deserve to be further studied.
