Abstract

From strictly linguistic studies, the characterization of multisemiotic written specialized texts has been scarce or almost null. Not many corpus-based studies focus on the description of graphs, tables, and diagrams, as well as their layouts, as part of academic texts. The objective of this study is to identify, describe and quantify the occurrence of (multi)semiotic artifacts which are present in a sample of texts (1.043) belonging to the PUCV-2010 Academic Corpus. The corpus was collected in twelve PhD programmes in six Chilean universities and comprises all the documents students are given to read during their formal curricula, with the exception of those included in the final doctoral research (3,160 written texts, which are distributed among Physics, Chemistry, Biotechnology, History, Literature, and Linguistics). As part of the results, nine artifacts were identified and defined, based on the distinction of four semiotic interacting systems: verbal, graphical, mathematical, and typographical. Interesting differences are detected between Basic Sciences (BS) and Social Sciences and Humanities (SS&H), due to the prototypical type of artifacts and also considering the quantification of their occurrence across disciplines. © 2011 Universidad de Concepción. Facultad de Humanidades y Arte.