Natalia Ignatieva’s research while affiliated with National Autonomous University of Mexico and other places

This paper presents a systemic functional analysis of process types in academic texts in Spanish from the Appraisal Theory perspective in order to establish connections and observe the interaction of the experiential and interpersonal metafunctions and the systems of Transitivity and Attitude. Our purpose is to explore how student writers use process types to construe their specific disciplinary experience, how they inscribe attitudinal meanings in their texts, and how the Transitivity and Attitude systems interact in student choices in academic writing. We used student texts from the CLAE corpus (Ignatieva, Natalia & M. Cecilia Colombi (eds.). 2014. CLAE: El lenguaje académico en México y los Estados Unidos, un análisis sistémico funcional. Mexico: UNAM). The texts belong to two disciplines (literature and history) and to three text types, or genres, labeled in the university setting as essays, reviews, and question-answers. The methodology included a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 1) process type realizations, 2) expressions of Attitude, classified according to type (Affect, Judgment, Appreciation) and 3) interaction between the process types and Attitude types. This was followed by a comparative analysis between the disciplines and genres, detecting both the similarities and the differences. In addition, some patterns that combine process types and Attitude expressions were found. Such patterns could represent an important tool in the teaching of academic writing in Spanish.

Diferentes textos económicos institucionales del Banco de México son publicados en español y traducidos al inglés. Dado el potencial impacto económico causado por posibles faltas de equivalencia en las traducciones, estudiamos un corpus bilingüe desde el punto de vista de las técnicas de traducción y de la lingüística sistémico-funcional (LSF), a fin de identificar faltas de equivalencia o incluso errores de traducción. Específicamente, se analizaron las técnicas de traducción empleadas y se registraron y clasificaron los errores de traducción. Posteriormente, se aplicó un análisis metafuncional tridimensional: análisis ideacional (procesos y participantes); interpersonal (expresiones de actitud, formalidad, modalidad, etc.); y textual (coherencia en la organización temática). Si bien la identificación de los errores de traducción mejora el documento traducido, la exploración metafuncional aporta un análisis cualitativo más profundo de los aspectos no reflejados en las técnicas, revela las causas de los errores de traducción y puede servir como criterio en determinar la equivalencia.

Este artigo apresenta os resultados de um estudo cujo foco está na análise de textos discentes em três disciplinas das ciências humanas. O objetivo do estudo foi determinar, do ponto de vista sistêmico-funcional e por meio de uma análise da transitividade e dos tipos de processos, como diferentes campos do conhecimento e da experiência são representados nos textos dos alunos. Na análise, consideramos 80 textos escritos por estudantes de literatura, história e geografia em nível de graduação. Os textos pertencem a quatro gêneros distintos: ensaio, pergunta-resposta, resenha e relatório, todos redigidos em espanhol. A metodologia contou com análises quantitativa e qualitativa dos processos e sua tipologia em cada texto, seguida de uma análise comparativa entre as disciplinas e entre os gêneros de cada uma. Os resultados evidenciaram tanto semelhanças que identificam tais disciplinas como pertencentes à área de humanidades quanto diferenças que refletem seus campos específicos de conhecimento e sua construção de significados.

This paper presents the results of a study focused on the analysis of student texts in three disciplines from the humanities. The aim of the study was to determine, from a systemic functional standpoint and through a transitivity analysis of process types (HALLIDAY, 1994), how different fields of knowledge and experience are construed in student texts. In the analysis, we considered 80 texts written by undergraduate students of literature, history and geography. The texts belong to four different genres: essay, question-answer, review and report and were all written in Spanish. The methodology included a quantitative and qualitative analysis of process type realizations of each text, followed by a comparative analysis between the disciplines and between the genres considered in each one. The results showed both the similarities that unite these disciplines as part of the humanities area and the differences that reflect their specific fields of knowledge and construction of meanings.

This work intends to explore how certain process types in Spanish are related to the expression of appraisal in academic texts, our objective is to analyze verbal transitivity and evaluative aspects of student academic writing on history. Our study draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics and, in particular, on the Appraisal System, which explores evaluative meanings in language, here we shall analyze only one of its subsystems, attitude. The analysis is based on student texts belonging to two genres (question-answer and essay), but to only one discipline (history). Within the ideational analysis we explored three types of processes in academic texts: verbal, mental and relational while within the interpersonal framework we classified the clauses that express appraisal according to the three domains of the attitude system: affect, judgment and appreciation. The preliminary results show certain similarities between the two genres, for example, the prevalence of relational processes and the dominance of appreciation as the preferred means of expressing attitude. However, some differences were also found, for example, in the essays the percentage of clauses with negative evaluation grows considerably, and so does the number of clauses expressing judgment. These and other findings will be presented within a small discussion about the interaction of ideational and interpersonal meanings and, consequently, about the lexicogrammatical and semantic-discursive aspects of academic texts.

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 (J. R. Martin & White, 2005), which explores evaluative aspects of the language, here we shall analyze only one of its subsystems, Attitude. The method of this research is counting the number of words and clauses in our corpora and registered the frequency of verbal, mental and relational processes in these clauses. 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.

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.

El objetivo de este artículo es presentar un estudio sistémico funcional de procesos verbales, de los participantes asociados y de las características proyectantes de estos procesos en el lenguaje académico. El trabajo realizado forma parte de un proyecto de investigación que se ha desarrollado en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) y que, a su vez, está incluido en el proyecto internacional Systemics Across Languages (SAL). Los textos analizados fueron recopilados en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la UNAM y forman parte del Corpus de Lenguaje Académico en Español (CLAE, 2009). Para el análisis que aquí se presenta se tomaron del CLAE textos pertenecientes a un área (literatura) y tres géneros distintos: pregunta-respuesta, ensayo y reseña. Las bases teóricas de este estudio se sitúan dentro de la perspectiva sistémico funcional (Halliday, 2004), particularmente, en el marco conceptual de la transitividad. En primer lugar, se determina la frecuencia de los procesos verbales en el corpus y se identifican los participantes en distintos tipos de cláusulas verbales. Después, se explora con más detalle el participante más importante de la cláusula verbal, el Emisor. Se da también un énfasis especial al participante que expresa el mensaje del acto verbal, es decir, el Informe. Asimismo se examinan las características proyectantes de los procesos más usados en los textos escritos por estudiantes universitarios. Los resultados del estudio muestran que existe una variación importante entre los porcentajes de procesos verbales en cada uno de los géneros analizados. Por otra parte, diferentes formas de expresar “quién dice” y “qué dice” también contribuyen a las distinciones genéricas de los textos estudiantiles.