A Contrastive Study On Relational Process In Scientific Texts And Literary Texts

There have been a great number of studies focused on the relational process,few observations at present are about the different subtypes of relational process in different registers in English.Therefore,the present study attempted to find out the distributional differences and quantitative differences of different types of relational processes in English texts and to investigate whether these differences of relational processes are register based.The relational processes in the present study were measured with Halliday’s taxonomy.According to Halliday’s categorization,there are six categories of relational process,which are intensive attributive process,intensive identifying process,circumstantial attributive process,circumstantial identifying process,possessive attributive process and possessive identifying process.The present study selected 30 scientific texts and 30 literary texts to analyze the differences in the use of different types of relational process.The texts were written by different native speakers with the word limit of 4,500 to 6,000 words.The distributional modes of the relational process were compared from the perspective of distributional composition and distributional evenness.Independent sample t-test in the SPSS was adopted to compare the means of the frequencies of the relational processes in the two registers.The results showed that there were similarities and differences in the employment of relational processes between scientific texts and literary texts.Firstly,similarities were found in the distributional composition of relational process in the two registers.Intensive process was the mostly employed type in the two kinds of the texts,with possessive process the second,and circumstantial process the least.Meanwhile,similarities were also found in the distributional composition of the subtypes of relational process in scientific texts and literary texts.Secondly,significant differences lay in the quantitative use and distributional evenness of relational process in the two registers.The relational processes as well as its three subtypes were distributed more evenly in scientific texts than in literary texts.Moreover,the quantitative use of relational process as well as its three subtypes were significant different between scientific texts and literary texts.The findings of this study may shed some light on the study of the relational process as well as writing,translation and understanding of both scientific texts and literary texts.