scholarly journals Rhetorical argumentation in popular science discourse: Features and prospects

Author(s):  
Marina N. Volf ◽  

The nature of popular science discourse in recent decades has acquired a convincing function, while it is addressed to an audience that is not always loyal to science. There are new requirements for writing argumentative popular science texts and they must contain arguments that depend on the target audience. The need for a broad mastery of the skill of writing well-reasoned popular science texts is associated with the issues of understanding how successfully their function has been implemented to convince the audience and thе explication of technologies that help make these texts convincing, including the creation of a database of typical basic arguments. It is believed that the methods of computer analysis used in computational rhetoric can be used to study the argumentative specifics of popular science literature, and rhetorical argumentation should be the most productive approach to argumentation in a popular science text because only it provides ways of interacting with the audience. However, there are constraints for the development of this direction that make it difficult to find and annotate arguments in a popular science text, namely: an ambiguity in understanding the argument and argumentation, modeling various arguments depending on the understanding of their structure and function, and finally, the target audience modeling. Explication of arguments in the text is possible through linguistic markers, but there is a problem of establishing the boundaries of the argument. Identifying the internal structure of text segment relationships solves this problem, however, annotating the text is sensitive to certain methods of modeling argumentation. Based on the basic model of Toulmin’s argument, the special aspects of modeling rhetorical argumentation and its dependence on the target audience are illustrated. It is proposed that the concept of a universal audience can hardly be adapted to practical tasks, and criteria that are consistent with the format of truths and the format of audience values, the implementation of which could bring the target audience closer to an universal one. The author demonstrates the features in the pragma-dialectical approach, which, despite its popularity in computational rhetoric, do not allow it to be fully adapted to popular science discourse.

2021 ◽  
pp. e021025
Author(s):  
Natalia Igorevna Khristoforova

The present article analyzes the relevance of the combination of the verbal and non-verbal components of popular science text and the role of computer technologies and the global information network Internet in creating texts of this type. The author conducts a study to assess the impact of Internet technologies on the process of creating electronic popular science text in an attempt to determine the most promising technologies used in this process. The author concludes that the most advanced technologies have to be used in creating a popular science text. It is noted that the Internet era opens up new opportunities for creating popular science texts, however, the most effective way to create popular science texts combines verbal and non-verbal means (primarily photographs) and modern computer technologies. An important aspect of popular science text is a trend towards the reduction in volume which is achieved through photographs often replacing lengthy descriptions and explanations. Considering the polysemantic nature of photography and the stabilizing function of a text in relation to an image, an approach to the consideration of verbal and visual components in the framework of popular science text is proposed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 273 ◽  
pp. 11029
Author(s):  
Yana Kosyakova

The purpose of this work is to: 1) identify, study and analyze speech methods of updating scientific knowledge as a tool for influencing the reader's consciousness; 2) identify potential criteria for increasing the audience's interest in the presented scientific knowledge in the aspect of popular science discourse on the example of popular science articles from selected journals for analysis; 3) describe the influencing potential of these speech methods of presenting knowledge to the addressee. Methodology. The influencing potential of media sources that increase the interest of the readership is revealed through a series of studies describing the factors and methods of popularizing scientific knowledge in modern media on the basis of intersecting discourses (social-political, pedagogical, medical, etc.). The research is also based on the method of continuous sampling in the selection of practical material, the method of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The article substantiates the most effective and frequent speech patterns.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 208-235
Author(s):  
Jurgita Vaičenonienė ◽  
Jolanta Kovalevskaitė

Summary In Lithuanian public and academic discourse, discussions about the influence of English have received considerable attention. Much has been written on the English borrowings in Lithuanian or various translation strategies applied at word, phrase or syntactic levels of language, whereas there have been only few attempts to investigate how Lithuanian translated from English differs from original language. This is why we found it interesting to investigate lexical an morphological features of translated Lithuanian applying the methods of corpus liguistics. For research purposes, we used a morphologically annotated comparable 4 mln. word corpus of original and translated fiction and popular science literature ORVELIT. It has been found that translations deviate in certain ways from original Lithuanian. Translated Lithuanian has: a lower lexical density, higher proportion of function words, shorter sentences, and higher proportion of list heads; translated fiction has a lower lexical variability and smaller proportion of low frequency words, whereas in popular science translations, these differences are less evident. Keyword analysis has shown content differences in originals and translations and the overuse of personal and possessive pronouns in popular science translations. The distribution of content and function words differs in originals and translations and in different registers. Translated Lithuanian has: more verbs (especially finite forms and adverbial participles), but less nouns and adjectives; fiction translations have less and popular science more adverbs than originals; there are more pronouns and prepositions in both popular science and fiction translations; depending on the register, there are higher or lower numbers of conjunctions, particles and interjections. Some of the differences may be explained by the English language interference as: the overuse of the optional 1st person pronoun in subject position, the overuse of optional preposition “su” with instrumental case, or the overuse of optional link verb in the complex predicate. In other words, the English influence is seen in transferring certain features obligatory for analytical language where omission would be a more natural choice in original Lithuanian. These findings in most cases agree with the previous research on translationese of other languages. It is hoped that the identified tendencies to over- or under-use certain lexical and morphological features as a result of English language interference might appear to be useful when editing and translating.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-502
Author(s):  
E.A. Sidorova ◽  
◽  
I.R. Akhmadeeva ◽  
Yu.A. Zagorulko ◽  
A.S. Sery ◽  
...  

The paper discusses a software system designed to support the study of argumentation in Russian-language popular science texts. This system is based on an ontology built on modern principles of argumentation modeling. In particular, this ontology contains formal descriptions of typical reasoning schemes that are used for annotating texts, analyzing the arguments presented in them, and assessment of its persuasiveness relative to a given audience. A method of argumentative marking of a text is proposed, which provides the allocation of statements and the construction on their basis of an argumentation graph using knowledge about typical reasoning schemes. The paper also describes a set of web tools that provide the creation of thematic corpora, visualization of the argumentation ontology used, the construction of the argumentation graph, the selection of argumentation indicators in the texts, as well as the search for various entities in the text corpora in ontology terms. Analytical tools are presented by means of collecting statistical information on the occurrence of typical elements of argumentation in the body of texts, by means of researching indicators of argumentation and by means of analyzing the persuasiveness of argumentation. The novelty of the work consists in the development of an original methodology for studying argumentation in popular science discourse, based on the ontology of argumentation and supported by a specialized web platform.


2021 ◽  
Vol 273 ◽  
pp. 11027
Author(s):  
Svetlana Bylkova ◽  
Margarita Finko ◽  
Igor Kudryashov

The journalist’s personality acts as an intermediary between scientists and non-professional readers, whose knowledge of astronomy is limited, and the created popular science texts are a kind of communicative platform for voicing judgments. In this regard, journalists not only supplement the reader’s knowledge in an accessible form, but also open access to the voices of representatives of the scientific and astronomical community, relying on such means as direct and indirect speech, which reveal different degrees of frequency in the first paragraph of the text and in the subsequent narrating. To systematize the actual data indicating the explicit labeling of the source of information in a popular science message, the most frequent language signals that are used by journalists in order to introduce a other voice into the text (predicates that introduce direct or indirect speech) were analyzed. As a result, models and indicators of their frequency were identified, which provided an opportunity to trace the trends in voicing the expert astronomers’ opinions in a popular scientific text. It is established that the distribution of direct and indirect speech with explicit marking of the source of information in the first paragraph of the popular science text is not homogeneous. In this text segment, indirect speech is the most frequent, which allows the journalist to focus the reader’s attention on an unbiased vision of a scientific event.


Fachsprache ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 100-121
Author(s):  
Friederike Prassl

This article focuses on the decision-making processes involved in research and knowledge integration in translation processes. First, the relevance of decision taking intranslation is discussed. Second, the psychology of decision making as seen by Jungermann et al. (2005) is introduced, who propose a categorization of decision-making processes intofour types: “routinized”, “stereotype”, “reflected” and “constructed”. This classification is then applied to the translations by five professional translators and five novices of five segments occurring in a popular-science text. The analysis reveals that the decision-making types are distributed differently among students and professional translators, which also has to be seen against the background of whether the decisions made were successful or not. The preliminary results of this study show that students resort to reflected decisions in most cases, but with a low success rate. Professionals achieve a higher success rate when making reflected decisions. As expected, they also make more routinized decisions than students. The professionals’ success rates improve with increasing cognitive involvement, while their failure rates are relatively high when making routinized decisions, an aspect worthwhile considering in translation didactics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 502-512
Author(s):  
Sergey MONIKOV ◽  

2020 marks 280 years since the birth of the outstanding Russian naturalist and explorer Ivan Ivanovich Lepyokhin (1740-1802) and 275 years since the birth of the outstanding German explorer and naturalist Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin (1745-1774). An overview of scientific contribution to the study of nature and economics of the Russian Empire in general and the southeast of European Russia in particular made by these two leaders of the Academic Expeditions of 1768-1774 is presented. The author discusses a number of inconsistencies in S.G. Gmelin’s biography found in references (encyclopedias), scientific and popular science literature of pre-revolutionary Russia and the USSR. The question of I.I. Lepyokhin and S.G. Gmelin memorialization in Volgograd and Saratov Regions and the Republic of Dagestan has been raised.


Author(s):  
Natalia Vasilievna Salomatina ◽  
◽  
Irina Semenovna Kononenko ◽  
Elena Anatolvna Sidorova ◽  
Ivan Sergeevich Pimenov ◽  
...  

The presented work describes the analysis of argumentative statements included into the same text topic fragment as a recognition feature in terms of its efficiency. This study is performed with the purpose of using this feature in automatic recognition of argumentative structures presented in the popular science texts written in Russian. The topic model of a text is constructed based on superphrasal units (text fragments united by one topic) that are identified by detecting clusters of words and word-combinations with the use of scan statistics. Potential relations, extracted from topic models, are verified through the use of texts with manually annotated argumentation structures. The comparison between potential (based on topic models) and manually constructed relations is performed automatically. Macro-average scores of precision and recall are equal to 48.6% and 76.2% correspondingly.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 72-88
Author(s):  
Jarosław Dybek ◽  

The topic of the article is one of the German SS regiments stationed in occupied Poland and its role in The German occupation policy. While the history of the SS formation is very well known in both academic and popular science literature, its cavalry has not been elaborated in great detail thus far. Although this topic seems interesting, it has not yet been discussed in any book in the Polish language. Most of the literature related to this topic was published in German and English. The 1st SS Death’s Head Cavalry Regiment operated primarily in the General Government and was under the Higher SS and Police Command. Some of its squadrons also operated in areas annexed to the Reich, i.e. the Warta Voievodship (Reichsgau Wartheland). From this article we will learn about the formation of the SS Death’s Head cavalry and its gradual inclusion in the brutal occupation policy of the Third Reich in Poland. In the case of its formation, we are dealing with tasks such as combating the early partisan units, searching for weapons, participating in the creation of ghettos, or helping to eliminate Polish levels of the intelligentsia. Noteworthy is the participation of this unit in the production of the propaganda film “Kampfgeschwader Lützow”, in which Polish cavalrymen were presented attacking German tanks with sabres. This false image was reproduced after the war in some movies or books, and contributed to the distorted presentation of Polish soldiers in the defensive battles of 1939.


Author(s):  
Olga Grynko

When used in the texts, foreign words often function as a stylistic device and become a relevant feature of the author’s individual style. The article looks at the issues of functioning and translation of foreign words with the focus on those not being “adapted”, that is preserving its original “foreign” form (unlike those being transcribed without morphological and syntactical changes). The work systematizes the ways these elements are introduced into the original text. It shows they can either be introduced with no explanation, relying on the reader’s general expertise and creating certain environment, flavour etc. or be accompanied by any kind of their meaning’s explanation). The article also offers the insights into the key functions of the foreign words in popular-science texts (specifically, they make the text sound more authentic and documentary, and also display author’s intelligence and competence). Further, the research finalizes the classification of the ways to translate/render the foreign words in the translated text in the view of the genre peculiarities of popular-science texts. Among other ways, such as preserving a foreign word with a translation of the author’s comment, transcription/transliteration, translator’s comments, actual translation into the target language, etc., such texts allow for science editor’s comments in translation.


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