Role and Position of Scientific Voices: Reported Speech in the Media

Calsamiglia, Helena; Ferrero, Carmen López

doi:10.1177/1461445603005002308

Cited by 80 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 11 publications

(11 reference statements)

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“…Discourse analytic approaches to popularization have variously investigated writerreader relations, the asymmetry or symmetry of their communication, the different voices involved (see for example Bensaude-Vincent 2001;Myers 2003;Calsamiglia & Ferrero 2003;Minelli & Pagano 2006) as well as the relations between quoting and quoted voices (Minelli & Pagano 2006, 641). The asymmetrical relations between the interlocutors of specialist and non-specialist genres are mirrored in formal or functional variation in language features.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence (re)presentation and evidentials in popular and academic history: facts and sources speaking for themselves

Bondi¹,

Sezzi²

2017

KLB

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The paper pivots around the different roles of evidentials and the different ways in which evidence is represented in the discourse of popular and academic history, thereby exploring the dynamics of both genres from a discourse analytical perspective. The analysis is based on two corpora of academic and popular articles on history. In particular, it is focused on those lexico-grammatical resources for tracing the speaker’s source and mode of information that constitute the distinguishing features of the two genres. The analysis shows that the high frequency of saw in popular articles refers to the narrative of history, and to the evidence provided by historical characters and sources, rather than by the speaker. The frequency of the attributor according in academic journal articles, on the other hand, clearly qualifies as evidentiality in the narrative of historiography, and acts as a marker of the importance of sources in historical reasoning. The different frequencies thus seem to be related to the different communicative and social functions of the two genres and to be closely connected with the triptych of narratives (Bondi 2015) involved in historical discourse.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence (re)presentation and evidentials in popular and academic history: facts and sources speaking for themselves

Bondi¹,

Sezzi²

2017

KLB

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“…The choice of source may in itself indicate a specific framing (Bellamy et al, 2012;Calsamiglia & López Ferrero, 2003). In the present material, the scientific 'sophistication' of the phenomena reported on makes it natural for the journalist to look to expert sources for comments.…”

Section: Framing Activity In Sources' Statementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As regards the second reporting verb, argues, its attitudinal value is less clear. There are also occurrences of evaluative reporting verbs in WP and GUA, but only in combination with genericized (Calsamiglia & López Ferrero, 2003) sources:…”

Section: Framing Activity In Sources' Statementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contested Science in the Media

Dahl

2014

Written Communication

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Science reporting in the media often involves contested issues, such as, e.g., biotechnology, climate change, and more recently, geoengineering. The reporter's framing of the issue is likely to influence readers' perception of it. The notion of framing is related to how individuals and groups perceive and communicate about the world. Framing is typically studied by means of content analysis, focusing primarily on the 'stories' told about the issue. The current paper, on the other hand, springs from an interest in writer behavior. I wish to investigate how news writers strategically exploit their rhetorical competence when reporting on contested issues, and I argue that text linguistics represents a fruitful approach to studying this process. It is suggested that genre features may serve as a basis for identifying key framing locations in the text, and that the notion of evaluation plays an important part in writers' framing activity. I discuss these aspects through a case study involving six news reports on a geoengineering experiment. KeywordsScience communication, news discourse, framing theory, text linguistics, genre, evaluation For most people, the reality of science is what they read in the press. They understand science less through direct experience or past education than through the filter of journalistic language and imagery. The media are their only contact with what is going on in rapidly changing scientific and technological fields, as well as a major source of information about the implications of these changes for their lives. (Nelkin, 1995, p. 2)The two decades that have passed since this observation was made have seen the rapid development of new information and communication channels for mediating science issues to non-expert audiences, such as the blog network ScienceBlogs (scienceblog.com; see also Colson, 2011;Luzón, 2013) and initiatives like the university-based scientific news portal Futurity (futurity.org). However, traditional media sources such as newspapers still seem to represent important providers of news to the general public (e.g., Pew Research Center, 2013), and the To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and /or treatment recommendation for the item described. (Entman 1993, p. 52, italics in original) From a writing perspective, framing may thus be considered as a process that implies a strategic (conscious or subconscious) choice of angle (frame) by the text producer. The chosen framing implies selecting specific aspects of the issue/event at hand, making these particular aspects salient to readers. Considered in this perspective, framing clearly relates to persuasion. It thereby shares concerns with classical rhetoric, e.g., the notion of special topic, which deals with the specific content of an argument through deliberative, forensic, or epideictic oratory. Fahnestock (1986) shows how scientif...

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“…Previous research on popularization discourse has focused on linguistic strategies employed by experts to simplify, organize and illustrate specialized content (see, e.g., Nwogu 1991;Hyland 2010;Calsamiglia/López Ferrero 2003;Ciapuscio 2003;Garzone 2006;Bamford 2014;Bondi 2014;Garzone 2014), placing emphasis on aspects such as content management and reformulation. Consideration has also been given to the negotiation of expert/non-expert roles during faceto-face communicative exchanges (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Reconceptualization of Academic Discourse as a Professional Practice in the Digital Age: A Critical Genre Analysis of TED Talks

Compagnone¹

2015

HJLCB

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This paper explores how academic discourse is reconceptualized as a professional practice via the web-mediated genre of TED talks (Technology, Entertainment and Design), popularizing speeches delivered by experts in fi elds that range from the 'hard' disciplines to the social sciences and the humanities. More precisely, this study compares two corpora of academic spoken discourse, i.e., a corpus of transcribed TED talks given by academics (TED_ac) and a corpus of university lecture transcripts (MICASE_lect) drawn from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) to understand how academics' communicative purposes differ in these two settings. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Critical Genre Analysis (Bhatia 2012) and Discourse Analysis (Goffman 1981;Fairclough 1989;Pennycook 1994;De Fina 1995;Benwell/Stokoe 2006;De Fina 2006), the present study sets out to investigate ways in which academics make use of language on the TED stage to achieve their "private intentions" as professionals (Bhatia 2012), e.g., building up their identity as experts as well as promoting their research and scholarship, rather than training a group of novices in their discipline or merely informing mass audiences. To this end, consideration is given to the distribution of fi rst and second person pronouns in the two pragmatic contexts under investigation. Special emphasis is placed on referents and discourse functions of the pronoun we, which is signifi cantly more frequent in TED_ac than in MICASE_lect. Despite its language-centered approach, this study has a marked sociological intent, as it casts light on an instance of academic discourse seen as an example of "professional practice" embedded in the wider context of a "professional culture" (Bhatia 2012).

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Role and Position of Scientific Voices: Reported Speech in the Media

Cited by 80 publications

References 11 publications

Evidence (re)presentation and evidentials in popular and academic history: facts and sources speaking for themselves

Evidence (re)presentation and evidentials in popular and academic history: facts and sources speaking for themselves

Contested Science in the Media

The Reconceptualization of Academic Discourse as a Professional Practice in the Digital Age: A Critical Genre Analysis of TED Talks

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