Communicating Findings. A Functional Analysis of a Medical Research Article.

In all fields, especially that of medicine, the role of research articles has increased progressively over the last few decades. Their main function is to inform the scientific community at large of recent achievements in the area of medical research. Drawing on Halliday’s Functional Grammar, the present contribution aims at exploring the linguistic mechanisms underlying this particular type of text. After a general presentation of a number of studies that focus on the specifics of the research article as a genre, we shall then delineate the theoretical framework of our investigation. The central part of our article consists in a functional examination of a medical research article which may be safely taken as an example of the genre it belongs to. The present analysis deals, in particular, with the linguistic choices made at both clause and clause complex levels with a view to construing and communicating medical knowledge.