The intentional and functional approach to describing the linguistic features of the English-language patent

The intentional and functional approach is taken to describe the linguistic features of the English-language patent which are viewed upon as the result of the author’s communicative intention and the patent function respectively, while the genre is understood as a text-building model. The goal is to identify linguistic features of different levels present in the text of patents under study, resulting from the author’s intention and the genre function as well as being typical of patents. The methodology is as follows: 1) identifying the author’s communicative intention; 2) identifying the communicative function resulting from the author’s intention; 3) describing linguistic features of differrent levels carrying out the communicative function in the text, that is, undertaking the functional and stylistic analysis. The theoretical assumptions are demonstrated drawing upon information technology patents, while patents are understood to be a peripheral genre of the scientific style and part of the scientific and official substyle. Patents are part and parcel of the patent law evidencing the owner’s right for a specific scientific and technical invention. The author’s extralinguistic goal, or intention, is to convey new knowledge about the invention in a precise form, which results in the informative function of the patent genre, manifesting itself at the lexical, syntactical, and textual levels in the form of the following linguistic features: multicomponent collocations of terms expanded with participle constructions and subordinate clauses; multi-predicate sentences expanded with homogenous parts; as well as the patent-specific composition. The intentional and functional approach allows for describing the linguistic features of patents not only as a set of individual units, such as archaisms, officialese, and terms, but as a model composed of interrelated and intertwined components.