Grammatical choices of ditransitive patterns in academic articles

Abstract Texts are products of systemic functional choices determined by contextual factors . To analyze how the context affects writers’ lexico-grammatical choices, this paper attempts to study ditransitive patterns in the research article genre across medical science and sociology, a choice explained by the gap in the literature of genre analysis of ditransitivity. To this end, ditransitive patterns are quantified in a corpus of 245 academic articles from medical science and sociology published in 2011. The analysis shows that the object–prepositional object pattern dominates both disciplines, which can be explained by its being a compactness device enabling writers to observe the communicative functions of the research article genre. Across the two disciplines, the higher frequency of clausal patterns in sociology than medical science reveals the explicitness and persuasiveness of writers in sociology, which may be attributed to the different research methods, and the nature of knowledge accumulation in each discipline. These findings lead to the conclusion that the choices of ditransitive patterns are determined by the generic features of the research article genre and disciplinary specificities, though they are also influenced by the different research topics across disciplines and the category-selectional properties of ditransitives.