8
Analytical language 1: sentences
The world was made before the English language, and
seemingly upon a different design.
Robert Louis Stevenson
This chapter first reviews the sentence structures which
underlie the preferred formal style of academic writing:
r the functions of referring and predicating in simple
sentences: why these functions are important to academic
writing, and when it is possible to bend the rules
r how conjunctions, sentence adverbials and punctuation
are used to build successful complex sentences out of
simple ones.
Then we look at the meanings of the sentence’s parts –
participants, processes and circumstances – and the
nature of the relations between them, so as to avoid the
danger of:
r putting together in the same sentence human or
non-human participants with incompatible processes
which don’t ‘make sense’
r turning what are really processes into abstract
participants in such a way that your language either
obscures the identity of the participants or confuses
abstract participants with concrete processes
r failing to preserve a distinction between what we can say
about words and texts and what we can say about the
material world which we enquire into.