Metadiscourse in Research and Popular Science Articles or how to please the audience: a cross-generic and intra-generic analysis in search of a common metadiscursive core.
Esta comunicación da cuenta de una investigación empírica que estudia qué tienen en común los artículos de investigación de la ciencia y los artículos de divulgación de la ciencia. Se analizan los atenuadores en los artículos de investigación y los marcadores fáticos, conativos y los elementos poéticos en los artículos de divulgación. Constituyen las dos caras de una misma moneda: la relación entre autor y lector, o relación metadiscursiva, fuertemente unida al concepto de tenor (Halliday 1978). Así, el metadiscurso es un aspecto pragmático común a ambos tipos de texto o géneros, vistos como constructos sociales (Gazdar 1981, Fairclough 1992, 1995). Ambos deben gustar a la audiencia mediante distintas estrategias pragmáticas con el fin de persuadir.My paper gives account of an empirical research carried out in an attempt to bridge the gap
between research articles (RAs) and popular science articles (PSAs) from the viewpoint of metadiscourse. Both
hedges in RAs and phatic, conative and poetic elements in popular science articles are two faces of
metadiscourse, tightly linked to Halliday's tenor (Halliday, 1978), alluding to the interpersonal macro-function
of language. Therefore, metadiscourse can be viewed as an essential aspect in the pragmatic handling of the two
above mentioned genres. A view of these genres as social constructs is, therefore, central to my study (Gazdar,
1981; Swales, 1990; Fairclough, 1992, 1995). RAs and PSAs, although differing in their generic macrostructure,
share part of their communicative goal: they must please their audience. RAs aim entails persuading and
convincing their scientific communities, whereas PSAs purpose is to inform, entertain and persuade an audience
partly made of lay public.
Aim of the research: Towards that end, I have compared the use of hedges in RAs and of phatic,
conative and poetic elements in PSAs, as the major and most prototypical devices that integrate their
metadiscourse. The aim has been to trace the linguistic resources displayed in both genres, seeking some
homogeneity or difference that can provide a sound account of their common metadiscursive core, thus
depicting the nature of the relational pressure from their respective tenors.
Method: A cross-generic and an intra-generic comparison have been conducted. On the one hand,
hedges have been analysed in RAs, following Salager-Meyer's (1994) and Hyland's (1998a, 1998b)
classification proposals, attempting thus to establish their specific representational choice. On the other hand,
following the tenets of Jakobson's language functions, I have searched and described the linguistic encoding of
phatic, conative and poetic functions (Jakobson, 1971, 1985), analysing PSAs morfosyntactic, lexico-semantic
and stylistic levels. An English language corpus has been collected, with 15 texts for each genre, making a total
of 30. Results and conclusions: Results have shown that RAs display a quantitatively greater use of
metadiscursive resources than PSAs, epistemic and auxiliary verbal forms accounting for the most
representative choices made through the hedging phenomenon. This would indicate that the relational pressure
with the tenor in RAs suggests a rich and powerful metadiscourse, mainly achieved through politeness strategies
that cater for the required self-concealment and objectivity. PSAs metadiscourse analysis evidences a
quantitatively lower number of devices and relies mainly on pronominal forms of self-reference which provide a
strong discourse subjectivity, meeting in this way the tenor's requirement for persuasiveness
