The Construal of Experience Through Transitivity in Student Academic Writing Across Humanistic Disciplines: A Systemic Functional Analysis

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• transitivity
• humanities
• academic texts