Nataliia Denysova
Senior Lecturer at the Department of English Language and Communication
Faculty of Romano-Germanic Philology
Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University,
Kyiv, Ukraine
e-mail: n.denysova@kubg.edu.ua
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9744-4553
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24195/2616-5317-2025-41.5
SUMMARY
The study aims to explore how cognitive verbs express epistemic and analytical intentions in research articles on online education. The analysis draws on a self-compiled corpus of 1,400 English- language papers published in Scopus and Web of Science journals between 2020 and 2023. These publications reflect how digital learning reshapes both pedagogical practice and the language used to describe it. The research focuses on the semantic and pragmatic behaviour of cognitive verbs, explaining how they operate as signals of analytical thought and academic evaluation. The theoretical background combines corpus linguistic methods, speech- act pragmatics, and the framework of Appraisal Theory. This combination enables the examination of frequency data alongside contextual interpretation. Using SketchEngine (window ±5 words, logDice ≥ 5), the study analyses how verbs such as understand, identify, recognize, analyze and assume function within scientific writing. Results show that these verbs shape three interrelated layers of academic reasoning. The epistemic layer involves comprehension and conceptual clarification; the analytical one concerns data interpretation and logical organisation; the socio-pragmatic layer expresses acknowledgment and validation of shared knowledge. Each verb fulfils its own communicative role: understand conveys insight, identify marks diagnostic activity, recognize reflects acceptance of value, analyze signals methodical thinking, and assume introduces a hypothetical view. Together, they reveal the movement from understanding toward evaluation and collective meaning-making. The findings highlight how language choices embody intellectual process in scholarly writing and may help refine both the teaching of academic English and computational approaches to discourse study.
Key words: cognitive verbs, academic discourse, online learning, corpus linguistics, pragmatics.
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