Connecting science. Organizational units in specialist and non-specialist discourse.

The paper aims at providing an overview of variation across specialist and non-specialist genres in the discourse of science. The focus is on “general language” – and organizational units in particular (Sinclair and Mauranen 2006) - rather than specific terminology. Growing attention has been paid to the tools of discourse organization and their evaluative implications, with a view to their discipline specificity (Hyland 2000, Hyland and Bondi 2006). Disciplines are often characterized by their argumentative strategies as well as by their content, and phraseology can be a helpful signpost to discourse organization. How are these reflected in popularising discourse? How is the “same content” presented to the non specialist reader? The paper explores the variety of organizational units employed by the discourse of physics and biology in the SPACE Corpus, a corpus of academic journal articles and relative popularisations collected at the university of Chemnitz. The corpus allows a double dimension of comparison: across disciplines and across genres (and tenors). The methodology adopted combines a corpus and a discourse perspective (Bondi 2007). A preliminary analysis of frequency data (frequency wordlists and statistical keywords) offers an overview of quantitative variation. Attention is paid both to a range of organizational units, from general connectives (but, if) to other discourse markers involving meta-argumentative and self-reflexive lexis (in the case of). The study is based on the analysis of concordances and clusters; the co-text of the nodes is analyzed with a view to their textual patterns, so as to bring out the semantic and pragmatic implications of many organizational units. Special attention is paid to the ways in which the generic and argumentative structure of discourse is represented across the whole field, highlighting for example convergences and divergences between specialist and non-specialist discourse. Frequencies and patterns are interpreted in the light of factors characterizing academic discourse and specific disciplinary values. Organizational units are shown to contribute to highlighting the significance of the data or conclusions produced, as well as to mapping the territory of current debate. They thus also become resources by which the author negotiates the his/her position with the reader according to genre-specific orientations.