The fundamental purpose of scientific discourse is not the mere presentation of information and thought, but rather its actual communication. As a result, it becomes important for scientists that a large majority of the reading audience accurately perceives what they want to communicate. The language of science contains distinctive linguistic features that can pose challenges to comprehension and composition of scientific texts, and in particular, of research articles (RAs). Halliday (1993), for example, identifies a number of difficulties that are characteristic of scientific English such as lexical density, grammatical metaphor, syntactic ambiguity or semantic discontinuity among others. In this study, we will focus on the syntactic complexity of scientific discourse. More precisely, our aim is to explore the uses of hypotactic relations in three different sections of research articles (RAs) taken from the fields of Psychology and Applied Linguistics. In other words, this paper examines which of the messages authors present are subordinate to others. Another aim is to analyse the frequency of use of hypotactic relations in the different sections of the RA of our corpus: abstract, introduction and discussion. We will also describe all the possible relations these hypotactic clauses enter into with their head clauses and analyse if there is any correspondence between the type of logico-semantic relations and the rhetorical functions those sections of the RAs have.
We will base our analysis on the theoretical concepts of taxis and logico-semantic relationships drawn from the Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004; Eggins 2004; Thompson 2004). For our study, we will focus on a small corpus of RAs in field of Psychology and Applied Linguistics taken from prestigious journals from the last four years. We expect that a qualitative analysis of the different sections of the RAs can reveal a number of differences in the choice and frequency of occurrence in patterns of hypotaxis in both disciplinary groups.
