Reader guidance routines in scientific writing - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

Reader guidance routines in scientific writing

Résumé

Scientific discourse uses a specific language in the scientific "discourse community" (Swales, 1990), especially through the transdisciplinary scientific phraseological elements (collocations, routines, etc.) (Granger, 1998; Pecman, 2004; Tutin, 2014). These specific lexico-syntactic prefabricated patterns illustrate the routinized style of academic writing. By analyzing these prefabricated expressions, we have identified some recurrent expressions used to facilitate reading, which we call "routines of reader guidance". These routines are part of transdisciplinary scientific phraseology, exercising specific rhetorical functions of a metadiscursive nature in scientific discourse. Their presence is not aimed at providing informative content, but at facilitating the understanding of the content transmitted during communication (Hyland, 2005). For example, the routines Il est important/fondamental/central/essentiel de souligner/noter/relever (It is important/fundamental/central/essential to emphasize/note/point out) , L’enjeu/problème principal/central est de/que (The main/central issue is that ) are often used to underline important passages of the scientific texts without changing the essential idea of the propositional content. Studying these guiding routines has several interests: in terms of phraseology, it constitutes a research topic that has not been much analyzed in traditional phraseology, especially in the French tradition. It is thus essential to delimit defining parameters and to establish an adequate linguistic description of this kind of expressions. On the enunciative level, these routines reflect the interactive nature of scientific writing. The example cited above brings into play the interlocutory operation of scientific writing, which involves a dialogue ‘in abstentia” with the addressee (Bres, 2005, 2017) to draw his or her attention to salient facts. On a functional level, the guiding routines fulfil specific rhetorical functions. The present paper is a corpus-driven study of the guidance routines. We used the TermiTH corpus (500 research articles in humanities and social sciences, 10 disciplines, with syntactic annotations). With the help of the Lexicoscope (Kraif, 2016), we extracted the routines using the method of "recurrent lexico-syntactic trees " (ALR), based on combinatorial association and statistical word cooccurrence estimation (Kraif & Tutin, 2017). We took advantage of a semantic classification of the transdisciplinary scientific lexicon (LST), developed within the TermiTH project (Hatier et al., 2016; Jacques & Tutin, 2018). This lexicon contains about 1700 simple words and multiword expressions belonging to four grammatical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs), divided into 264 semantic subclasses. Our method allows to detect regularities throughout classes of words, and allows to describe routines in a more abstract way. For example, expressions such as Il est important/fondamental/central/essentiel de souligner/noter/relever, can be described with semantic labels such as "It is ‘ESSENTIAL’ to ‘HIGLIGHT’ an information/observation " according to the pattern "il est(it is) + Adjectives of importance + de(to) + Verbs of observation/emphasis/diffusion + que(that) / nominal argument ". The method exposed here has been applied to three main types of reader guidance routines according to their primary functions : 1) the topicalization (Ji&Tutin, 2020) aim at highlighting the information; 2) the textual structuring has for the purpose of organizing the text; 3) metalinguistic aspects pay attention to the use of language and terms (Ji&Tutin, 2019), of which we will present examples of treatment in more detail with some subclassifications.

Domaines

Linguistique
Europhras.Ji-Kraif-Tutin.Presentation_version finale.pdf (844.22 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)

Dates et versions

hal-03892377 , version 1 (09-12-2022)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03892377 , version 1

Citer

Yujing Ji, Olivier Kraif, Agnès Tutin. Reader guidance routines in scientific writing. Europhras 2021, Sep 2021, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. ⟨hal-03892377⟩

Collections

UGA LIDILEM
9 Consultations
1 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More