Los sintagmas nominales en textos científicos escritos en español

Abstract

This study examines a number of textual-discoursal functions performed by noun phrases in scientific articles and students' papers written in Spanish, mainly by those which exhibit great syntactic complexity. After identifying and describing 13 micro-functions in operation in both articles published in some Chilean social and natural science journals and in papers written by university students, we propose that syntactically complex noun phrases perform 4 important discoursal-textual macro-functions: referential, predicative, textual configuration, and the hierarchical organisation of information. While the first two functions have received attention in standard Spanish semantically-oriented text grammars, the last two seem to emerge mainly as part of a text-discourse oriented cognitive approach.