Characteristics of Scientific and Technical Language
Language in Scientific and Technical Texts
The scientific and technical discourse is typical of scientific disciplines and, along with other discourses, is called professional language. Science tries to explain the laws governing the phenomena that make up our physical reality. Hence, the need for precision in this type of universal knowledge means that scientific-technical discourse has the following general characteristics:
- Universality
- Verifiability
- Objectivity
- Clarity
- Rigor
Scientific-technical texts usually maintain an expository structure, but may merge with objective description and, to a lesser degree, with argumentation and narration. There exist two types of articles based on the level of knowledge the receiver has on the subject matter:
- Outreach: Aimed at a medium-educated public. Consists of newspaper articles and texts included in encyclopedias.
- Specialty: Aimed at receivers with deep knowledge of the subject matter, generally confined to academia. These include monographs, textbooks, PhD theses, etcetera.
Scientific-technical texts tend to adopt an expository structure. The content can be approached in two ways:
- Inductive: From the particular to the general; thus, it clearly sets out the stages through which the investigation passed.
- Deductive: From the general to the particular; it starts from a general hypothesis that is ultimately applied to a particular phenomenon.
Characteristics of Scientific Language
Depending on the need for information, accuracy, clarity, and universality, scientific-technical language has the following characteristics:
- Pragmatic Level: Absolute predominance of the referential function of language.
- Phonetic Level: Declarative intonation.
- Morphosyntactic Level:
- Abundant use of the generalizing article, plural of modesty.
- Use of specified nominal structures.
- Adjective structures generally preferred after the noun.
- Use of: indicative mood, gnomic present, verbal periphrasis.
- Logical discourse management, hence a profusion of passive sentences (traditional and reflexive), impersonal sentences with ‘it’, coordinated and juxtaposed structures, and clarifying sentence elements.
- Semantic Level: Use of denotation and monosemy, recurrence (linguistic repetition).
Creating Scientific and Technical Terms
With the rapid advancement of science and technology, there is a need to create new terminology for naming discoveries. Thus emerge neologisms and technical terms specific to individual scientific disciplines. Common forms of creating scientific-technical terminology are these:
- Drawing on Roman and Greek cultisms. Sometimes the terms are hybrids, combining a Greek word and another Latin one. They may also be formed with cultist prefixes and suffixes.
- Linguistic heritage procedures: suffixation, composition.
- Acquisition through language loans: preferably taken from English, although some are from other languages.
- Semantic calques: adopting the meaning of a foreign word, adapting its content.
- Through acronymy (or acronyms), which involves collecting the initials of several words. Such is the case of radar, which includes the initials of the English words radio detection and ranging.