Kjersti Fløttum

Traces of self and others in research articles. A comparative pilot study of English, French and Norwegian research articles in medicine, economics and linguistics

This article presents a pilot study which has been undertaken as preparation for a comparative research project called “Cultural identity in academic prose”. The general aim of the project is to study which aspects of scientific activity are most important for what we may call cultural identity in academic writing. Whether such identities are primarily national or discipline-specific is discussed. The project involves research articles from three disciplines – medicine, economics and linguistics – and three languages – English, French and Norwegian. The central questions are related to authorial presence and stance, to the manifestation of other researchers’ voices and to the authors’ promotion of their own research. This article takes a linguistic approach, and the pilot study focuses on the use of the following categories: first person pronouns, metatextual comments, explicit and implicit references and lexical items. The pilot study comprises 18 research articles; in the large-scale study the corpus will consist of about 500 articles. In the pilot study presented here the main finding is that the proposed categories seem to be well suited to the purposes of the large-scale study. The data also allow some preliminary hypotheses about ‘non-expressive medical researchers’, ‘shy economists’ and ‘polemic linguists’ to be formulated.

Arguing for climate policy through the linguistic construction of narratives and voices: the case of the South-African green paper "National Climate Change Response"

The purpose of the present paper is to examine a selection of macro- and micro-linguistic features (at text and sentence/word level respectively) of the South-African Green Paper “National Climate Change Response” from 2010. Our overarching assumption is that the Green Paper needs to handle competing interests, beliefs and voices in a narrative structure favouring specific courses of action. How does the government portray the complex natural and societal phenomenon of climate change, and how does it take into account the many and often competing national and international views and interests which come into play? Our hypothesis is that the Green Paper constructs a narrative and that it relates to a number of voices other than that of the authors, through linguistic markers of polyphony, such as negation, sentence connectives, adverbs and reported speech. Thus we propose a narrative and polyphonic analysis of the Green Paper, at the level of the text as a whole (macro-level) but also with attention to linguistic constructions of polyphony or “multi-voicedness” (micro-level). We find that the narrative-polyphonic properties of the Green Paper contribute to a strategy for building consensus on climate change policy. The South African government assumes the role of main hero in its own climate change “story”, and there are subtle forms of interaction with different and typically non-identified voices, such as concessive constructions and presuppositions. These results support our overarching interpretation of the whole document as striving to impose a South African consensus on the issue of climate change.

A linguistic framework for studying voices and positions in the climate debate

Abstract The public debate on the highly contested issue of climate change is characterized by a multitude of voices as well as position taking by the social actors involved. Studies involving the climate issue have emanated from many fields, notably media science. To date, few linguistics-based studies on climate-related newspaper texts have been undertaken. This paper presents a theoretical framework – the Scandinavian theory of linguistic polyphony – which we argue is particularly well suited to analyze contested issues. To demonstrate how the theory can be operationalized, we present a case study involving four texts from The Guardian. Linguistic polyphony rests on the assumption that all texts are multivoiced. The case study focuses on the interaction of the journalist’s voice and external voices, and considers the extent to which implicit (hidden) voices are present in the analyzed texts. The analysis reveals a complex interaction of different voices, integrated in the journalist’s own argumentation and positioning.

Variation of Stance and Voice across Cultures

My point of departure in this chapter, focused on how stance and voice vary across cultures in academic writing, is that these two discursive features are closely related. I will lay special emphasis on voice since it always implies a stance, regardless of how clearly marked the latter may be. The issues I will be addressing (Sections 2–4) are the following: To what extent can we expect to find stance and voice in written academic discourse? What are the cultures that may influence it? Through which linguistic features may stance and voice be expressed? In my concluding remarks (Section 5) I will also raise the question of cultural difference in a world of increasing internationalization. Before discussing all these aspects, however, I would like to review a brief selection of previous work on cultural differences related to stance and voice in one way or another. While there is a large body of literature examining stance and voice across disciplines and genres, research into their cultural variation in academic discourse is relatively modest. One reason for this may be the difficulty of defining what a culture is or could be in this context. I will return to this point later in Section 3.

The role of social justice and poverty in South Africa's National Climate Change Response White Paper

Abstract In late 2011 the South African government published a White Paper outlining climate change response policies for the coming decades. Among the main topics of the text were the socio-economic and climatic vulnerabilities of the country, including the situation of the poor. With the aim of analysing the argumentation regarding climate change and social justice we develop a combined linguistic and discursive approach, starting with occurrences of keywords pertaining to rights, equity and poverty. The White Paper’s conceptualisation of climate change is explored as a narrative, at the level of the text as a whole. This combined analysis shows that the legal rights of the poor are hardly given any place in the argumentation, whereas less constricting political intentions are far more present. Furthermore, the text attributes a passive role to the poor, dependent on the benevolence of a government that attributes the role of hero to itself.

Young Norwegians and their views on climate change and the future: findings from a climate concerned and oil-rich nation

ABSTRACT Young people represent the future, but little is known about their attitudes towards climate change, one of the most serious issues facing the world today. The purpose of the present study is to contribute with improved and new knowledge of young Norwegians’ understanding of and attitudes towards this issue, with a special focus on perspectives of the future. Of particular interest is the influence of divergent framings of the climate question in Norway, due to conflicting interests between the petroleum industry and climate concern. The young peoples voices are elicited through two different surveys undertaken during the fall of 2013, one national (Norwegian Citizen Panel) and one local (School survey conducted among high-school students). The study generated both quantitative and qualitative findings, stemming from closed-ended as well as open-ended questions. The data were handled through a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses. The results show that the voices tend to be oriented towards the opinion that Norway has a responsibility to help poor countries as well as a duty to prevent climate change and that the country should reduce its oil production. We further observe that young Norwegians have an optimistic view of the future, based on a pronounced belief in technology and science.

Teksttype og polyfoni

There is a general scepticism as to definitions of text types based on determined lin-guistic criteria. The subject of this article is to show how it is possible to strengthen the linguistic basis of text typologies. After a description of the evolution of text typology from Werlich (1976) via van Dijk (1980) to Adam (1992), linguistic polyphony is presented as a contribution to a linguistic foundation of Adamis prototypical typology. It is shown how the polyphonic structure can describe, make explicit and explain ty-pological text features.