Discourse Analysis and Science

Background and Examples

Discourse analysis has its origins in the field of sociolinguistics and maintains an emphasis on the ways that language interacts with social institutions, values, and communities. In concrete terms, social institutions can include the academic system of tenure and publishing, values include prestige or reputation of individuals or institutions, and communities might range from an entire discipline (for example, all biologists) to a small subset of the discipline (a small team of biologists working on a project to evaluate a wetland area threatened by development). Discourse analysis research methods have been applied to scientific communication as part of an overall trend of examining the ways that scientific knowledge is constructed and transmitted through language. Scholars who use this method begin from the assumption that the language we use acts on our perceptions and social conventions in powerful ways.

A variety of approaches can be used to analyze relationships between language and social institutions. A researcher might work closely with a scientist, reading drafts of grant proposals, viewing comments from peers and reviewers, and interviewing the scientist to discover the rationale behind revisions from one draft to the next. The researcher would also analyze the social context: Is the scientist tenured, or does tenure depend on receiving this grant? How are reviewer comments influenced by ongoing controversies in the discipline, and how does the scientist respond to those comments? What resources does the scientist have access to as he or she works to get the grant funded? Similarly, a researcher using discourse analysis to study press releases introducing new technologies might observe a writer interviewing a technical expert, follow the process the writer uses to draft and revise the press release, and interview the writer to learn why this topic is considered significant and how the text will be distributed.

Perhaps the most controversial assumption of discourse analysis as a research method is the notion that the specialized language of science makes scientific research possible. To demonstrate the mutual relationship between language and scientific language, linguist Michael Halliday studied the way that early scientific writers such as Isaac Newton often transformed verbs (such as refract) into nominalizations (refraction). This linguistic analysis shows how scientific language enabled scientific researchers to see the world in [Page 233]terms of abstract processes, such as the behavior of light, that can be generalized into sets of natural laws. In that way, Halliday suggested, scientific language coevolved with and enabled modern scientific thought.

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