Stephen Hawking's Community-Bound Voice A Functional Investigation of Self-Mentions in Stephen Hawking's Scientific Prose

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Department of English, Maragheh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Maragheh, Iran

Abstract

Thanks to the development of the concept of metadiscourse, it is now widely acknowledged that academic/scientific writing is not only concerned with communicating purely propositional meanings: what is communicated through academic/scientific communication is seen to be intertwined with the negotiation of social and interpersonal meanings. While a large number of so called metadiscoursal resources contribute to the simultaneous negotiation of propositional and interpersonal meanings, the present study aimed at investigating the functions self-mention forms can fulfill in academic/scientific communication. Two of Stephen Hawking's scientific books were selected as the corpus of the research, and based on Tang and John's (1999) model, the constructed corpus was analyzed in terms of the functions self-mention forms can fulfill in academic/scientific writing. The findings revealed that from among the different roles identified by Tang and John, the representative role constituted the most frequent self-mention function in the corpus. The remarkably heavy presence of representative role in Hawking's scientific prose was interpreted as a further evidence for the claim that scientists are more likely to persuade readers of their ideas if they frame their messages in ways which appeal to appropriate community-recognized relationships.

Keywords

References

Adel, A. (2006). Metadiscourse in L1 and L2 English. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Breivega, K.R, Dahl, T., &Flottum, K. (2002).Traces of self and others in research articles:
A comparative study pilot study of English, French and Norwegian research articles in medicine, economics and linguistics.International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 12, 218- 239.
Bunton, D. (1999). The use of higher level metatext in PhD these.English for Specific Purposes, 18, 41-56.
Candlin, C. N. (1997). General editor's preface in B.L. Gunnarsson, P. Linell and B. Nordberg (Eds.), The construction of professional discourse (pp. ix-xiv). London: McMillan. 
Charles, M. (2006). The construction of stance in reporting clauses: A cross-disciplinary study of theses. Applied Linguistics, 27, 492-518.
Crismore, A. (1983). Metadiscourse: What is it and how is it used in school and non-school social science texts. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois.
Crismore, A. & Farnsworth, R. (1989).Mr Darwin and his readers: exploring interpersonal metadiscourse as a dimension of ethos. Rhetoric Review, 8(1), 91-112.
Dahl, T. (2004). Textual metadiscourse in research articles: a marker of national culture or of academic discipline? Journal of Pragmatics, 36, 1807-1825.
De Oliveira, J.M. & Pagano, A.S. (2006). The research article and the science popularization article: a probabilistic functional grammar perspective on direct discourse representation. Discourse Studies, 8(5), 627-646.
Fairclough, N. (1992). Introduction in N. Fairclough (Ed.), Critical language awareness. London: Longman.
Foucault, M. (1972).The archeology of knowledge, Trans. Smith, S. London: Tavistock.
Fowler, R. ( 1981). Literature as social discourse: The practice of linguistic criticism. London: Batsford Academic. 
Halliday, M.A. K. ( 1973/2004). The functional basis of language. In J.J. Webster(Ed.),  On language and linguistics (pp. 298-322). London / New York: Continuum.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1993/2004).Writing science: literacy and discursive power. In J.J. Webster (Ed.), The language of science (pp. 119-225). London/New York: Continuum.
Harwood, N. (2005). “We do not seem to have a theory . . . The theory I present here attempts to fill this gap”: Inclusive and exclusive pronouns in academic writing. Applied Linguistics, 26, 343-375.
Henderson, W. (2001).Exemplification strategy in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.In M. Hewings (Ed.), Academic writing in context (pp. 150-168). Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham Press.
Hewings, A., &Hewings, M. (2001). Anticipatory “it” in academic writing: an indicator of disciplinary difference and developing disciplinary knowledge. In M. Hewings (Ed.), Academic writing in context (pp. 199-214). Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham Press.
Hoey, M. (2000). Persuasive rhetoric in linguistics: a stylistic study of some features of the  language of Noam Chomsky. In S. Hunston& G. Thompson (Eds.) Evaluation in text (pp. 28-37). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hunston, S. (1994).Evaluation and organization in a sample of written academic discourse.In M. Coulthard (Ed.) Advances in written text analysis (pp. 191-218). London and New York: Routledge.
Hyland, K. (1994). Hedging in academic writing and EAP textbooks.English for Specific Purposes, 13( 3), 239-256.
Hyland , K. (1996a). Nurturing hedges in the ESP curriculum.System, 24( 4), 477-490.
Hyland , K. (1996b). Writing without conviction? Hedging in Science research articles.Applied Linguistics, 17( 4), 433- 454.
Hyland, K. (1998). Boosting, hedging and the negotiation of academic knowledge.Text, 18(3), 349-382.
Hyland, K (1999). Talking to students: Metadiscourse in introductory textbooks.English for Specific Purposes,18(1), 3-26.
Hyland, K (2002a). Directives: argument and engagement in academic writing. Applied Linguistics, 23(2), 215-239.
Hyland, K. (2002b) .Options of identity in academic writing.ELT Journal, 56(4), 351- 358.
Hyland, K. (2002c). Activity and evaluation: Reporting practices in academic writing. In J. Flowerdew(Ed.).Academic Discourse (pp.115- 130).Longman.
Hyland, K. (2004). Graduate gratitude: The generic structure of dissertation acknowledgments. English for Specific Purposes, 23(3), 303-324.
Hyland, K. (2008). 'Small bits of textual material': A discourse analysis of Swales' writing. English for Specific Purposes, 27, 143-160.
Hyland, K. (2007). Applying a gloss: Exemplifying and reformulating in academic discourse.Applied Linguistics, 28(2), 266-285.
Hyland, K. (2009). Academic discourse. London: Continuum.
Hyland, K., &Tse, P. (2005).Hooking the reader: A corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts. English for Specific Purposes, 24, 123-139.
Jaworsky, A. &Coupland, N.  (1999). Introduction in A. Jaworsky and N. Coupland (Eds), The discourse reader (pp. 1-44). London and New York: Routledge.
Kuhn, T. (1970).The structure of scientific revolution (2nded). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Myers, G. (2001). “In my opinion”: The place of personal views in undergraduate essays. In M. Hewings (Ed.), Academic writing in context (pp. 63-78).Birmingham,UK: University of Birmingham Press.
Lautamatti, L. (1987). Observations on the development of the topic of simplified discourse. In U. Connor & R. B. Kaplan (Eds.), Writing across languages(pp. 87-114). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Lecercle, J.J. (2006). A Marxist philosophy of language.Translated by Elliott. Leiden: Brill.
Lee, D.  (1992). Competing discourses. London: Longman.
Mauranen, A. (1993). Contrastive ESP rhetoric: Metatext in Finnish-English Economic texts. English for Specific Purposes, 12, 3-22.
McEnry, T. &Kifle, N.A. (2002).Epistemic modality in argumentative essays of second language writers. In J. Flowerdew (Ed.) Academic Discourse (pp. 182-195).London, UK: Longman.
Richards, S. (1987). Philosophy and sociology of science: An introduction (2ndedn). Oxford: Blackwell.
Salahshoor, F. ,Kuhi, D., Suluki, S. &Golmohammadi, S. (2012). Exploration of interpersonality in discourse: The case of Widdowson's texts. Iranian Journal of Teaching Languages and Literature, 13:1 (31), 73-90.
Shi-Xu (2005).A cultural approach to discourse. Palgrave McMillan. 
Swales, J. (1990).Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J., Ahmed, U. K., Chang, Y., Chavez, D., Dressen, D. F., & Seymour, R.(1998). Consider this: The role of imperatives in scholarly writing. Applied Linguistics,19, 97-121.
Tang, R. & John, S. (1999). The "I" in identity: Exploring writer identity in student academic writing through the first person pronoun. English for Specific Purposes, 18, 23-39.
ThueVold, E. (2006). Epistemic modality markers in research articles: A cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary study. International Journal of Applied Linguistics,16(1), 61-87.
VandeKopple, W. (1985).Some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse.College Composition and Communication, 36, 82-93.
Journal of English Language Pedagogy and Practice
Volume 8, Issue 17
Summer and Autumn 2015
Pages 82-99

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics