Abstract While corpus studies on academic writing have improved instructional materials for writing in the hard sciences, humanities and social sciences world language writing pedagogy remains open to development. In the interest of data-driven Spanish for academic purposes curricula, using English and Spanish corpora of psychology, history and literary criticism articles, we analyzed nouns occurring in sentence-subject position in 100 randomly-sampled sentences. In both languages, psychology had significantly more epistemic, and fewer phenomenal, sentence subject nouns than the other two fields. We extended our analysis to lexical bundles containing Spanish-English equivalent noun phrases in sentence-subject position which occurred significantly more often in psychology in both languages. The results are discussed in terms of scientific and humanities writing pedagogy for both languages.