Realization of verbal processes in scientific texts in the field of civil engineering

Abstract

This paper, linked to the SAL project, presents a study on the realization of verbal processes in Brazilian Portuguese in Civil Engineering texts. Its aim is to analyse the linguistic forms that realize verbal processes, how often they are used and what meanings they produce in texts in that field. The corpus consists of the 51 texts in the 2 volumes of the book Concreto: ciência e tecnologia, published by IBRACON (Instituto Brasileiro do Concreto). To compile the corpus we followed the principles of Corpus Linguistics (Sardinha, 2004; Almeida & Correia, 2008). The identification of the linguistic forms and the quantitative treatment of the data were done with the help of WordList and Concord from WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2008). The analysis of the linguistic forms was based on the criteria of Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) to describe and classify verbal processes. The results show that the most frequent verbs in the corpus, recommend and specify, work as processes of semiosis of the group command and may be considered characteristics of the scientific discourse in Civil Engineering. Linguistic forms in the third person in the present and in the participle work as a resource for impersonality in the scientific discourse.