O uso de processos existenciais no domínio acadêmico: uma análise com base em corpus de artigos científicos

Abstract

This work aims at analyzing the use of the most frequent existential processes in research papers from different areas of knowledge, from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2014), particularly within the complementary models of transitivity and ergativity. For the analysis of the existential processes in research papers, a subcorpus of the Corpus Acadêmico do Português Brasileiro (CAPB) was used, encompassing approximately 12.5 million words and 2.898 scientific articles. The results show that the use of the existential processes in academic texts in Brazilian Portuguese is associated with the construction of argumentation, as well as with both models of Ergativity and Agentivity. In addition, in these texts, the absence of an explicit agent operated as an argumentative strategy, producing an effect of objectivity. The existential processes thus functioned as a mechanism that contributed to the impersonalization and to the objectification of the text, while allowing the writer to defend his stand or to point out the research methods and the results, while also making suggestions in the research field, without explicitly inserting themselves into the textual flow.