The transitivity system in the academic vocabulary of research articles in Brazilian Portuguese
Abstract
This article analyses the transitivity system instantiated by the most frequent academic verbs in research papers in Brazilian Portuguese, based on the proposed division of vocabulary by Webb and Nation (2017) and Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). To achieve this purpose, a corpus of 12.3 million words was compiled, containing research papers from all eight Major Areas of knowledge, representing the different disciplines according to CNPq, so that there was sufficient variety of linguistic evidence to identify academic vocabulary. From preliminary results, these items were analysed from the perspective of Systemic-Functional Linguistics, in which we observed that the choices of types of processes, the configuration of the sentence and the participants, directly reflect the characteristics of the academic genre, specifically writing of research articles, such as impersonal writing, focus on research activities and procedures, and objectivity when reporting results. Thus, through the description of the transitivity system in frequent academic verbs, we expect to contribute to a deeper understanding of academic writing, in addition to advancing theoretical studies under different perspectives of analysis, based on real expositions of the language in use.
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