A comparative study of substitution in chemical and anthropological magazine news and journal commentaries

Sabiha Choura

Abstract

Considered as a powerful language approach with “comprehensive descriptions” (Halliday 1964), Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) can empower practitioners in analyzing texts, being informative of the structural choices in a given linguistic context (Fontaine et al. 2013). Thus, SFL enables researchers to get deeper insights into how language is used in context and how generic and/or “disciplinary meaning” is construed (Moore et al. 2018).  Seeing the importance of generic and disciplinary context in deciphering interlocking linguistic choices (Sellami-Baklouti 2013 & Choura 2019), this study attempts to investigate substitution, given its role in building textual unity and construing the information flow (Halliday & Hasan 1976). Although substitution has been studied in various genres including students’ writings (Klimova & Hubackova 2014), scant attention has been given to its use across Commentaries and News, both of which communicate scientific knowledge but differ in information literacy. This study, therefore, aims to examine substitution in Commentaries and News across two disciplines, i.e. Chemistry and Anthropology, with a view to exploring how the choices of substitution are determined by (i) generic and (ii) disciplinary conventions. To this end, a corpus totaling 42536 words written by American authors is selected, and annotated, following Halliday and Hasan’s model of grammatical cohesion (1976), and using the UAM CorpusTool. The analysis shows that genres and disciplines have a powerful impact on the choices of substitution. It also reveals that there is more preference for substitution in News than Commentaries and in Chemistry than Anthropology. The findings of this study may have pedagogical implications as it may empower teachers in developing writing course designs according to the specificities of the relevant genres and disciplines.