Systemic Functional Linguistics and its Application to the Study of Academic Conference Presentations

Academic conference presentations (CPs) offer the possibility to study both the linguistic features of academic oral language and social conventions that take place during these events (Ventola, Shalom & Thompson, 2002). Academic conferences have been understudied (Robles Garrote, 2016), especially within the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). For this reason, researchers who investigate this topic have insufficient reference literature. This study contributes to the understanding of CPs by discussing theoretical and methodological aspects of the analysis of a corpus of 32 CPs given in Spanish in the United States to determine the generic structure or prototypical text structure within the SFL framework. The macrogenre and orbital structure constructs (Martin & Rose, 2008) are proposed as ideal for the CPs' analysis. The analysis showed a particular generic structure for CPs, variation according to discipline and membership in the academic community. In this sense, this study helps to reduce the knowledge gap that exists about this topic and offers a methodological model to future SFL researchers.