Interdisciplinary Comparison of Verb Complementation Patterns in Selected Nigerian University Course Textbooks: Insights from Humanities and Natural Sciences

This paper describes the variation in the distributions and use of verb complementation types and patterns in selected academic textbooks. The theoretical framework is Chomsky’s phrase structure grammar. The data, obtained from the first chapters, titled, ‘General introduction’ and ‘Atom and its structure’ of purposively selected English Studies and Physics textbooks, comprising 473 transitive verb phrases are manually analyzed. The findings reveal that three verb complementation types, mono-transitive, intensive, and complex-transitive, vary in patterns across the two textbooks with the mono-transitive V+NP and intensive V+NP patterns being dominant in English while the complex-transitive V+PP pattern dominates in Physics. The findings contribute to the description and understanding of discipline-specific verb complementation types and patterns. It concludes that the varying verb complementation types and patterns can instantiate disciplinary variation in academic textbooks. This has pedagogic implications for explicit and focused instruction on the discipline-specific verb complementation patterns that would facilitate Nigerian students’ awareness of the different verb complementation types and patterns and the development of competence in English for general and specific academic purposes. The paper recommends a more exhaustive study of the discipline-specific verb complementation patterns would tremendously provide more pedagogic insights relating to students’ learning of English for general and specific academic purposes. Such knowledge of verb complementation patterns in academic textbooks undergirds their efficiency in the students’ comprehension and production of academic texts. The paper suggests further research in this area relating to disciplinary and subject textbook variability as such has pedagogic implications.