This work is part of the research project "Verbal processes in academic writing in the light of Systemic Functional Grammar" which was developed at the Foreign Language Centre of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The objective of the project is to analyze verbal transitivity in student writing and research articles from the Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective. Verbal transitivity analyzes locutional and symbolic processing constructions, and the participants involved in these constructions. Our goal in this paper is to present a study of student texts belonging to three genres of the university curriculum (question-answer, essay and review) and of expert texts (research articles) in terms of the verbal process frequency in each genre and each area. Besides, we are going to explore projecting characteristics of our corpus in general, and of the ten most frequent verbs in this corpus, in particular. The results indicate that there is an important variation among the verbal process frequencies and their projecting characteristics in different genres and areas under analysis.
Abstract:The purpose of this study was to explore, from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar, how passive clauses in a medical research article were translated into Spanish, specifically if they were kept in the passive voice, were changed into the active voice, or were turned into some other structure, and if voice change in the translated version affected the original thematic development. The medical paper chosen for this study was originally written in English and published in an Anglophone journal; it was then translated into Spanish and published in a Mexican journal. Both the original and the translated article were analyzed in terms of Theme and Rheme; all of the instances of passive and active voice were quantified and compared. The results show that in some cases the original thematic patterns were modified in the translation due to the use of the reflexive passive in Spanish, which results in the fronting of the verb in the sentences, thereby causing a change of Themes in the paragraphs with respect to the original structure. This study contributes to our understanding of the function of passive constructions in English and Spanish and its relationship with thematic progression.
Research articles have been the object of study of many scholars within the ESP tradition, most notably, since Swales' (1990) studies on academic language. Such studies have focused mainly on ‘moves' and ‘steps', i.e. on the part-whole relations that comprise each of the sections in a research article. However, little is known about the iterative connectivity of sentences and paragraphs that make up the discourse organization of research articles sections. This study uses Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1987) for the analysis of discourse relations in introductions and conclusions of research articles from applied linguistics journals in two languages, English and Spanish. It also uses Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1985) in order to locate introductions and conclusions within a general theory of register. The results showed significant trends across registers and languages that can inform the teaching of writing within the context of academic expository texts.
In this paper we report an analysis of clause connections in two corpora: introductions and conclusions from research articles taken from applied linguistics journals in Spanish and in English. For the analysis, we use the systemic-functional classification of logico-semantic clause nexuses into paratactic and hypotactic expansion (elaboration, extension, and enhancement) and projection (idea and locution). We quantify the frequency with which each nexus type appears in each corpus in order to see if there are significant similarities and differences. The results show that the first two most frequent relations are the same in both corpora but the third is different. We claim that the frequency with which each nexus type appears has functional motivations that are useful for the writers of research articles. The results might have important implications for the writing of research articles in both L1 (first language) and L2 (second language).
One of my purposes was to listen, to hear speech, accent, speech rhythms, overtones, and emphasis. For speech is so much more than words and sentences.
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