The present dissertation focuses on the study of scientific discourse through the investigation of non-finite clauses in a corpus of research articles. To account for the frequency of these constructions, both formal and functional approaches are adopted. The central claim of this study is that certain patterns of non-finite clauses are favored in research articles since they help researchers maintain a balance between an objective exposition of scientific knowledge and a subjective promotion of scientific claims. In order to test this hypothesis and examine the research questions, quantitative and qualitative methods are employed to describe the distribution of non-finite clauses in a corpus of research articles extracted from two different disciplines which are medicine and social psychology. This choice is motivated by the assumption that the nature of the discipline affects the distribution of non-finite clauses. The analysis has proved that non-finite clauses are mostly used to maintain impersonality of style and evaluate the results. Moreover, their distribution displays variation that is linked to the nature of the discipline and to the different sections of the research article.
As language provides a repertoire of options to its users to construe their intended meanings, picking one structure and not another while formulating a given text has implications on the interpretation of the latter (Sellami-Baklouti, 2011, p. 503). Yet, considering how different texts belong to distinct genres and how the latter represent “different ways of using language” (Eggins, 2004, p. 66), it is expectable that they reflect distinct lexico-grammatical choices depending on the communicative purposes characterizing each. When it comes to legal discourse, one generic type of language use, the notion of ‘choice’ becomes even more pressing as the legal norms need to be worded as clearly and unambiguously as possible to convey their precise legal effect. A careful selection of patterns especially when it comes to formulating circumstantial material is then indispensable. In this context, the present thesis focuses on the study of adverbial clauses as one common structural pattern in a collection of treaties as well as academic legal articles. The claim defended in the current thesis is that international law drafters have preferences for certain adverbial types over others depending on the communicative specificity of each sub-genre as well as their own communicative intents. In order to validate this hypothesis, this piece of research approaches adverbial clauses from both Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Structural Descriptive Grammar perspectives, marrying the structural, semantic and stylistic dimensions that are likely to focalize how form and function interact to produce meaning in discourse. The quantitative and qualitative analyses have revealed that the most frequently used adverbial patterns, which are non-finite purpose clauses, function to strike the balance between the rituals of the legal genre requiring precision, clarity and all-inclusiveness and the personal intentions of the authors for recognition, promotionalism and persuasion. The findings have also confirmed the idea that the generic specificities of each legal camp equally impose linguistic choices on the writers. In fact, whereas the legal drafters of treaties feel pressured to exclude argumentatively-loaded adverbial relations such as concession and finite reason clauses, the authors of law reviews expose more freedom in choosing explicitly evaluative adverbial forms.
SYFLAT is an academic association interested in the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a school of linguistics founded by the British linguist M. A. K. Halliday in 1961, and then developed and applied to many other fields.
