Clause Combining in Research Articles in Spanish and English: A Systemic-Functional Analysis

Abstract

In this paper we report an analysis of clause connections in two corpora: introductions and conclusions from research articles taken from applied linguistics journals in Spanish and in English. For the analysis, we use the systemic-functional classification of logico-semantic clause nexuses into paratactic and hypotactic expansion (elaboration, extension, and enhancement) and projection (idea and locution). We quantify the frequency with which each nexus type appears in each corpus in order to see if there are significant similarities and differences. The results show that the first two most frequent relations are the same in both corpora but the third is different. We claim that the frequency with which each nexus type appears has functional motivations that are useful for the writers of research articles. The results might have important implications for the writing of research articles in both L1 (first language) and L2 (second language).