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Article published In:
Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 37:2 (2024) ► pp.628–655

Implicit agent se-constructions

Modeling the language style in scientific abstracts

ORCID logo | University of North Carolina at Charlotte
ORCID logo | University of North Carolina at Charlotte
This study provides evidence to support the need for student-translators to be systematically exposed to analyzing and translating texts that give them the opportunity to observe how implicit agent se-constructions need to be used when translating from English into Spanish. A corpus of scientific abstracts was analyzed to compare the frequency of implicit agent se-constructions in abstracts written originally in Spanish and abstracts translated from English into Spanish. Both corpora tools and t-tests were used for comparing data. The results indicate that the abstracts written originally in Spanish feature a more frequent use of implicit agent se-constructions than the abstracts translated into Spanish. The researchers propose the use of scientific abstracts, both originally written in Spanish and translated into Spanish, as pedagogical instruments to model how implicit agent se-constructions operate, thereby promoting student-translators’ accurate use of such constructions, which are frequently used not only in scientific abstracts but also in a wide range of language domains in the Spanish language.
Keywords: agentless constructions, impersonal se , implicit agent, learnability, passive se , passive voice, scientific abstract
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1 Se-constructions
    • 2.2Obligatory use of implicit agent se-constructions
    • 2.3Learnability and teachability of implicit agent se-constructions
    • 2.4Corpus-based methodology
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Materials
    • 3.2Procedures: Text selection and annotation
    • 3.3Data analyses
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Pedagogical application
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • 7.Limitations of the study and future research
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.22022.rod
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