Verbal processes in academic language in Spanish: exploring discourse genres within the systemic functional framework

Abstract

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.