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The senior thesis is a relevant discourse genre to prove academic knowledge and to obtain a university degree. The descriptions of this kind of genre have been focusing on the lexical-grammatical and discursive rhetoric level; as well as in the process of construction and defense of the thesis. The semantic level, however, has been scarcely studied. This paper describes the characteristics of the authorial attribution of knowledge given by the semantic representation of utterances of the introduction and conclusion section. The corpus comprises 364 senior theses of four disciplines. First, we extracted utterances with explicit authorial attribution. Secondly, we constructed the semantic representation of statements according to the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). According to the results, we can highlight the use of the first person plural as the first argument of verbs of activity in structures do' (x, [pred' (x, y)]), mainly in the conclusion section. The thematic role perfomer presents a high frequency in all four disciplines. Speaker and judger are also very frequent in the x argument. Consequently, the most common macro-role is Actor. Finally, it is interesting to note the potential of using RRG in academic discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to identify common patterns in texts that function as Discussion of research articles in the area of Microbiology. With this purpose, a corpus of four texts was analyzed manually from the perspective of genre in Systemic Functional Linguistics. The schematic structure of the texts and the resources realizing it as configuration of meanings in the three metafunctions of language were explored. The analysis showed that the Discussion of research articles in this area realizes the genre warranty of the research, whose purpose is to legitimate the results found in the research in order to persuade the readers and to guarantee that they are pertinent to be incorporated to the body of disciplinary knowledge. The discourse-semantic resources found as relevant in the texts were the co-articulation of projection, a resource of the APPRAISAL system, and comparison, a resource of the conjunction system. Concede plus counter pairings were found only when the writer rejects possible objections of the readers. The resources found suggest that the new knowledge in Microbiology is integrated in a hierarchical structure of vertical knowledge. Due to the number of texts analyzed in this article, the results obtained are considered preliminary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]