Analyzing verbal processes in academic genres of the humanities in Spanish

Abstract

This work is situated within 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 this paper is to present an analysis of student texts belonging to three genres of the university curriculum (question-answer, essay and review), and one extra-curricular genre (research articles) in terms of the verbal process frequency in each genre and their projection characteristics. The results indicate that there exists an important variation among the verbal process frequencies and their projecting characteristics in each genre under analysis.