Pragmalinguistic Categories in Discourse Analysis of Science Journalism

• Authors: Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Drawing on selected approaches from pragmatics, functional linguistics, discourse space theories and evaluation theories, this article proposes a methodological framework for the study of science journalism. It presents the institutional context of science journalism, which is considered a hybrid discourse, as it combines features of science communication and of market-driven journalism, particularly the need for the coverage to meet the criteria of newsworthiness. To enable the study of how science journalists tend to engage the readers linguistically without foregoing the appearances of credibility, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of such pragmalinguistic categories as illocutionary force, reference and positioning, agency and stance, proximization and alignment, as well as emotivity and evaluation. Finally, the article illustrates the applicability of the above categories in a qualitative analysis of a special corpus of “most-read” medicine and biotechnology reports published in the online version of the popular international science magazine New Scientist. The analysis shows how to combine these categories in a productive way in order to develop a methodologically viable and theoretically grounded approach to doing (critical) discourse analysis of science journalism.

Keywords

EN

science journalism; hybrid discourse; discourse analysis; pragma-linguistics; newsworthiness

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 157-179

Dates

published

2016-03-17

received

2015-08-28

revised

2015-10-07

accepted

2015-11-28

online

2016-03-17

Contributors

author

Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska

• University of Opole, Institute of English, Pl. Kopernika 11, Opole, Poland

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/lpp-2015-0009