Analyzing Scientific Discourse: Features and Textual Elements
Analyzing Scientific Discourse: Key Features
They have reformulated in a more appropriate way what has been said.
Argumentative Markers
Argumentative markers reinforce an argument (actually, in fact…) or introduce an example (in particular, for example…).
Morphosyntactic Features
Scientific discourse reflects the objectivity and validity of science. Its purpose is to avoid expressive elements, references to the issuer, the presence of the receptor, and resources of persuasion.
Sentence Structure
- Prevalence of declarative sentences.
- Use of interrogative sentences with a didactic purpose.
- Sentences that avoid expressing the agent, both impersonal and passive reflexive.
- Substantive use of adverbial and built personal forms of the verb.
Vocabulary and Phraseology
Semi-combinations of vocabulary or phraseology of expertise: clear a mystery, consider a prayer…
Nominalizations are preferred: appointed preferred shares and nominalizations: classification, adding…
Nominalized qualities: embodiment, viscosity…
Tenses and Modes
- Use of the indicative mode (objectivity) and the timeless present, as science proposes general laws.
- Validity of conditional-use hypothesis.
- Employment of verbal forms of obligation when the text specifies limit values, prescriptions, test results…
Verbal Person
- Prevalence of the third person to expose impersonality.
- The use of first person plural often has a didactic purpose, being a plural of modesty or a generalization that involves the reader.
- The tendency to impersonality of speech does not imply the absence of modalizations or elements that express the speaker’s viewpoint.
Adjectives and Resources
- Employment of specified adjectives, descriptive and relationship or affiliation.
- With the same function, there are many adjacent prepositional and adjectival subordinate clauses that specify and explain.
- Accumulation of switches (or adjacent elements).
Semantic Features
Semantic features characterize these texts by the use of specific terminology and the presence of semantic phenomena such as hypernymy, hyponymy, and antonyms. There are plenty of technicalities, that is, the set of expressions that are called expressions peculiar to an area of knowledge.
By their denotative nature, scientific language uses words that are defined by reference to monosemy (meaning one thing, and designating a single object). Polysemy and irony are out of place in scientific discourse to avoid ambiguity and confusion.
There are different types of technicalities. By their origin, they can be Latino, common words that acquire a precise meaning, words of foreign origin (Anglicisms, Gallicisms), new terms (neologisms)… Also, by training, they can be derived, with special prefixes or suffixes, or compounds from elements of the classical languages, Greek and Latin. Of course, there are a large number of eponyms, acronyms, and abbreviations.
In the semantic aspect, the most common semantic phenomena are hypernymy and hyponymy, synonymy and antonyms, and rhetorical resources that can help support explanations and models, metaphors, symbols, personification…
Factual Texts
Specialized texts are classified by reference to the receiver, depending on the level of expertise: very specialized (to a lesser extent) and low level (the latter, the disclosure). The predominant role is referential and metalinguistic, on the terms that must be explained to readers.
In textual features in the texts of disclosure, the information is more general, we develop a theme through the mechanisms of exposure: definitions, analogies and cataphoric references (anticipating the subject), examples, questions…
In scientific news, the development of the subject is usually the result of the investigation, which adds an assessment, and presents an organization with the chronological narrative of events. Typically, it narrows the research, summarizes the basic issues, and sets out the main social implications.
Language Features
The issuer may be a specialist or a mediator: a journalist, for example. But the most usual is that whoever uses the third person, opinion verbs, verbal periphrasis, impersonality markers… trying to achieve maximum objectivity.