خلاصة:
Nonnative English-speaking scholars have often been reported to be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis their English native counterparts when it comes to writing a publishable research article (RA). When they submit their manuscripts to English-language journals, they sometimes receive comments criticizing their faulty English. One area of difficulty for these authors is the grammaticalization of neutrality, impersonality, and objectivity. Relying on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), as the analytic framework, and by comparing the transitivity systems of the manuscripts written by the scholars prior to submission with their after-publication version, this study investigated how this is achieved during the revision process. Results suggest that revisions tend to put the authors in the background of the text. This involves increasing the presence of relational processes and reducing the number of material ones, and as far as voice is concerned, the proportion of passive processes in relation to the active ones increases.
ملخص الجهاز:
Relying on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), as the analytic framework, and by comparing the transitivity systems of the manuscripts written by the scholars prior to submission with their after-publication version, this study investigated how this is achieved during the revision process.
Writers have been reported to tend to remove agency to objectify their discourse, and to achieve this they employ different structures such as passive voice (Lachovicz, 1981), intransitive ergative structures (Sinclair, 1990), active verbs with inanimate subjects (Master, 1991) and nominalizations (Halliday & Martin, 1993).
Frequency of Processes in Different Sections of AP RAs Introduction Method Results Discussion Total Material 1726 967 741 1603 5037 Relational 493 1107 482 1970 7504 Verbal 788 65 237 373 1463 Mental 546 59 119 608 2664 Existential 63 66 184 58 371 The changes made in processes had a different distribution across the different rhetorical sections of the RAs. The Introduction sections wherein authors try to create a research space through the acknowledgement of previous work (Swales, 1990) had the highest number of verbal (e.
The presence of relational processes and the passive voice are both typical of English scientific texts, as they serve to obviate the role of the author and hold noun phrases in relation to each other, construing phenomena as if they were things and holding reality still (Halliday & Martin, 1993).