The paper examines verbal and predicative structures in two contemporary scholarly texts in
the field of art history. The findings show that the two texts share several basic verbal
characteristics: the present tense predominates in both, the third person is used extensively,
while the future tense is relatively rare. Predicates in the conditional mood are also common,
allowing the authors to express possibilities, assumptions, and hypotheses. The main difference
between the texts lies in the use of compound predicates, which occur almost twice as frequently
in the second text as in the first. The most notable differences concern compound predicates
with a past participle ending in -n or -t and predicates with a noun or adjective functioning as
the predicative complement. Compound verbs, which represent a distinct subcategory of
compound predicates, are also relatively prominent. The analysis confirms that the structural
and semantic properties of verbs play an important role in shaping scholarly style and discourse,
while their use varies between the texts depending on the subject matter and the individual
author’s style of expression.
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