Idioma: Español
Fecha: Subida: 2021-04-29T00:00:00+02:00
Duración: 22m 07s
Lugar: Conferencia
Visitas: 745 visitas

Corpus-based analysis of evaluative stance in science popularisation articles in the English press

Julia T. Williams Camus (Universidad de Cantabria)

Descripción

In the last two decades, popularisation discourse has attracted growing attention within
the field of discourse studies, often with the aim of re-examining mistaken assumptions
about the nature of scientific communication from expert to non-expert domains (Myers,
2003; Molek-Kozakowska, 2017). For instance, traditional accounts of popularisation
regarded science journalists as mere translators of scientific “facts” for the lay public.
This view has been contested in current approaches that generally acknowledge a much
more active role played by journalists in the reporting of science in the press. In fact,
popularisation is best regarded as a recontextualisation of knowledge, which has been
previously constructed in specialised contexts, and is recreated in another communicative
situation for a different audience and with different purposes (Calsamiglia & van Dijk,
2004). In the new context, the journalist recreates a text not only to transmit scientific
information, but also to entertain and to inform the public of both the relevance and value
of a given scientific achievement to their lives (Fahnestock 1986; Radford 2009). As a
result, it is naïve to view popularisation articles as neutral reports of scientific advances
and devoid of any evaluation of the part of the writer of the text. In fact, corpus-based
studies on science popularisation articles point towards the use of linguistic strategies
with an evaluative potential such as attribution of source (Elorza & Pérez-Veneros, 2014)
and use of metaphor (AUTHOR, 2016). As part of a broader project investigating
evaluative stance categories in five discourse genres, this presentation reports on some
preliminary research on the role of evaluative stance and metaphor in a comparable corpus
of science popularisation articles. The corpus includes articles reporting on scientific
advances drawn from the English press, namely The Guardian (57,760) and The Times
(52,026). The analysis involved identification and tagging of evaluative expressions
following an annotation protocol for evaluative stance in discourse developed by the
research team (AUTHOR, 2020). In particular, the analysis involved the tagging of
evaluative expression for function (classifying, predicational or attitudinal), grammatical
category (noun phrase, adjective phrase, adverb phrase), metaphoricity, and value
(positive or negative). The study addresses the following research questions: 1) What is
the most frequent category used for evaluation? 2) Is there a preference for metaphorical
or non-metaphorical evaluative language? The analysis indicated that the most frequent
category combination was classifying, noun phrase, non-metaphorical and positive value.

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Congreso Cilc 2021

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Serie: CILC2021: Discurso, análisis literario y corpus / Discourse, literary analysis and corpora (+información)

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