An Exploration Of The Pattern "it Be V-ed That" In Esp Academic Articles

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) came into existence in the 1960's. During the five decades'development, ESP has become the most remarkable research field in the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching circle. In China, ESP became prevalent in the 1970's. Though started at a relative late time, the Chinese ESP teaching and learning is surging quickly these years. As ESP became more and more important in English learning and teaching, the research on ESP is of great importance to English learners and researchers in every field to improve their English academic writing skills.The patterns of a word can be defined as all the words and structures which are regularly associated with the word and which contribute to its meaning(Hunston,2000:37).To concentrate on describing these facts, Sinclair, Hunston and Francis have proposed a new theory to interpret English vocabulary and grammar called Pattern Grammar.In order to explore the phraseological patterns of ESP discourses, we have built a corpus, namely, Donghua Textile Academic Articles Corpus (DTAAC). DTAAC is a 8,216,775 word corpus, with the academic articles from 15 SCI English journals influential in the field of textile science. The present paper investigates the pattern "it be V-ed that", one of the most frequently occurring patterns in the corpus, and aims to answer the following questions:1) How is "it be V-ed that" realized by specific subpatterns in the Textile Academic Articles?2) What semantic and pragmatic features do these subpatterns possess?The investigation of the corpus pointed to the fact that "it is/was V-ed that" and "it auxiliary be V-ed that" were the most frequently occurring subpatterns of "it be V-ed that". This paper, therefore, focuses on the description of the two subpatterns and the analysis of their semantic and pragmatic features. It is expected that the research will be of help to the English academic writer and the linguistic researcher in deepening their realizations on the pattern "it be V-ed that".