The Construction of Medical Knowledge: A Semantic Taxonomy of Processes

The semiotic reality of medical discourse is linguistically organised into figures arranged in the grammar of the clause. Each clause is comprised of entities and processes in various relationships to each other. The writers of medical texts represent and bestow meaning on their experience of the world by choosing from among a selection of different types of figures: of happening, sensing, doing, being, having, and saying. Processes play a central role in figures since they provide their own models for construing the experiential content and organising the information flow of medical texts. The rich architecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics can provide the theoretical background and analytical tools for a thorough investigation of the linguistic selections made by medical writers to convey clinical knowledge. Considering this key role, the present paper aims at investigating the most frequent verbs used as processes in a corpus of medical research articles. The study reveals that the most recurrent verbs used as processes in this type of textual configuration share semantic features. This makes it possible to propose a taxonomic approach to processes with a view to studying their grammatical configuration and the discourse functions they serve.