The Bridge Between the World and Cognition: A Comparison of the Use of Metaphor in Professional, Popular and Pedagogic Science
Assignment 2 Option 1
1. Introduction
Language represents human’s experiences and different fields hold different ways of language using. The language of science actively constructs scientific reality, i.e. a way of looking at the world, the roles assigned to readers and the way of organizing information (LING337-nominalisation). However, science may be presented diversely according to the different intended audience, purposes and modes. Three texts chosen in this paper are all concerned with the same scientific reality, but their language differs widely. The ways in which science are presented in this three texts largely depends on their audience, purposes and modes. To put it another way, language of science in the chosen texts changes with changes in audience, purpose and mode. The focus of the present paper is on how the language of science changes with different audience, purposes and modes from the perspectives of genre, technical language, lexical density, nominal groups and nominalisation, information organization, writer-reader relationship and the use of visuals. The first section of this paper is a brief introduction of the background and purpose. Part two, the most important one, extensively focuses on the detailed analysis of language changes of science. Then the concluding section sums up the main ideas.
2. Analysis and comment
2.1 Genre
Swales (1990) indicates that genres are a class of communicative events linked by some set of communicative purposes shared by members of a particular community; these purposes are the rationale of the genre and help to shape the ways it is organized and the choices of content and style it makes (LING337-Genre). It can be seen that the communicative purpose of a genre is realized by highly organized move structure, which in turn is achieved by rhetorical strategies.
Text 1, taken from New Scientist, is a very popular international science magazine aiming at reporting the latest scientific development to
1. Introduction
Language represents human’s experiences and different fields hold different ways of language using. The language of science actively constructs scientific reality, i.e. a way of looking at the world, the roles assigned to readers and the way of organizing information (LING337-nominalisation). However, science may be presented diversely according to the different intended audience, purposes and modes. Three texts chosen in this paper are all concerned with the same scientific reality, but their language differs widely. The ways in which science are presented in this three texts largely depends on their audience, purposes and modes. To put it another way, language of science in the chosen texts changes with changes in audience, purpose and mode. The focus of the present paper is on how the language of science changes with different audience, purposes and modes from the perspectives of genre, technical language, lexical density, nominal groups and nominalisation, information organization, writer-reader relationship and the use of visuals. The first section of this paper is a brief introduction of the background and purpose. Part two, the most important one, extensively focuses on the detailed analysis of language changes of science. Then the concluding section sums up the main ideas.
2. Analysis and comment
2.1 Genre
Swales (1990) indicates that genres are a class of communicative events linked by some set of communicative purposes shared by members of a particular community; these purposes are the rationale of the genre and help to shape the ways it is organized and the choices of content and style it makes (LING337-Genre). It can be seen that the communicative purpose of a genre is realized by highly organized move structure, which in turn is achieved by rhetorical strategies.
Text 1, taken from New Scientist, is a very popular international science magazine aiming at reporting the latest scientific development to
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