Linguistic Features of Argumentative and Expository Texts

Argumentative Text Features

Morphosyntactic Linguistic Features

• An argumentative text can be written in first person singular (I think), in first person plural (plural inclusive, we believe), or impersonal (is considered).
• These texts have a dialogic character: the sender invites the recipient to follow their reasoning and adopt their point of view (e.g., "dear reader").
• Explanatory adjectives, adverbs, and syntactic constructions that indicate doubt, desire, or possibility, as well as exclamatory statements, often appear.
• Moralizing elements that indicate the involvement of the issuer in the speech, such as "frankly," "quite frankly," etc., are common.

Lexical-Semantic Features

• The lexical-semantic plane in argumentative texts stresses connotation (e.g., "Everything that does not change is dead").

Textual Features

• Argumentative texts are characterized by the presence of textual connectors expressing opposition (e.g., "yet," "however").
• Adversative, concessive, consecutive, causal, and conditional connectors also appear.

Expository Text Features

Morphosyntactic Linguistic Features

• The logical order of the sentence (subject, verb, and complement) dominates.
• Declarative sentences and specified adjectives predominate.
• The tense is typically the present tense and the gnomic present (e.g., "the sun is a star").
• The voice of the issuer is usually hidden by passive or impersonal constructions.
• Appositive structures, introduced with explanations and reformulations, predominate.
• These texts define concepts or explain facts.
• Coordination and juxtaposition are commonly used to list and group ideas.

Lexical-Semantic Features

• Prevalence of denotative values of words.
• Use of specialized vocabulary (jargon).
• Presence of abstract nouns and nominalizations (e.g., "the decline in precious metals").

Textual Features

• Use of typographical procedures: numbers, titles and subtitles, underlining.
• Abundance of anaphoric references that refer to elements mentioned previously in the text.
• Expository texts relate to other events that may occur through direct or indirect discourse.
• Use of discursive or logical textual connectors that reveal the internal organization of information (e.g., "first...", "therefore...").