Transitive and Attitudinal Aspects in a Functional Analysis of Academic Discourse in Spanish

Abstract

This paper presents a systemic functional analysis of three types of processes in academic texts: verbal, mental and relational. It intends to explore how certain process types in Spanish are related to the expression of evaluation in academic texts. Our study draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics and, in particular, on the Appraisal Theory, which explores evaluative aspects of the language, here we shall analyze only one of its subsystems, ATTITUDE. Our analysis is based on student texts collected at the Faculty of Arts, belonging to two disciplines: literature and history, but to only one genre: question-answer. The preliminary results show certain differences between the two corpora: in the literature texts clauses with appraisal prevail and JUDGMENT is the preferred means of expressing ATTITUDE, while the history texts prefer clauses without appraisal and APPRECIATION prevails among the subtypes of ATTITUDE.