Abstract

This article attempts to describe verbal inflection variation in research article sections written in Spanish. In order to depict these inflections, we analyzed a corpus of 42.086 verbal forms from 162 research papers. These papers are from six scientific areas and were obtained from the Chilean SciELO index. General results show that unmarked elements are always more frequent regardless the scientific area or the section. Besides, we can state that verb patterns are not affected by the scientific area under analysis. Finally, when the sections of the papers were analyzed, we could find out that variation takes place only in tense. These results are useful for both scientific discourse description and the didactics of scientific writing.