Application of systemic functional linguistics in contrastive analysis of scientific discourse in English language

Abstract

This paper investigates the potential of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)to elucidate the distinctive characteristics of scientific  discourse in English across the natural and social sciences. Through a contrastive analysis of two short academic texts,
the study aims to demonstrate how SFL can contribute to a deeper understanding of disciplinary language use, particularly within the framework of English forSpecific Purposes (ESP). The analysis centres on the ideational metafunction – more specifically, the experiential metafunction – with the goal of identifying the predominant process types in authentic texts from the two fields.