THE USES OF THE CLITIC ‘SE’ IN SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES: IMPERSONAL RESOURCES IN THE ACADEMIC WRITING

This study is part of SAL – Systemics Across Languages, a project, developed in association with researchers from China, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Thailand, whose aim is to study specific and universal features of languages. In Brazil, it project focuses mainly the study scientific language. This article aims to analyze the different uses and functions of the clitic se in scientific articles. This study excluded se when functioning as a reflexive pronoun or as a conjunction since their uses are clearly described and they are not related with the focus of this investigation: defocus of the participant. The theory underlying this research, Systemic Functional Linguistics (HALLIDAY, 1994, 2004), focuses language in use and analyzes the grammatical choices in texts (spoken or written) based on their context of culture and of situation. This paper shows se occurs in three categories: in middle constructions (self-caused process); in constructions that defocus participants, and in agnate constructions.