Trine Dahl

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.

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.

Contested science in the media: linguistic traces of news writers’ framing activity

Science reporting in the media often involves contested issues, such as, for example, biotechnology, climate change, and, more recently, geoengineering. The reporter’s framing of the issue is likely to influence readers’ perception of it. The notion of framing is related to how individuals and groups perceive and communicate about the world. Framing is typically studied by means of content analysis, focusing primarily on the “stories” told about the issue. The current article, on the other hand, springs from an interest in writer behavior. I wish to investigate how news writers strategically exploit their rhetorical competence when reporting on contested issues, and I argue that text linguistics represents a fruitful approach to studying this process. It is suggested that genre features may serve as a basis for identifying key framing locations in the text, and that the notion of evaluation plays an important part in writers’ framing activity. I discuss these aspects through a case study involving six news reports on a geoengineering experiment.

The Linguistic Representation of Rhetorical Function: A Study of How Economists Present Their Knowledge Claims

This article deals with how economists present their new knowledge claim in the genre of the research article. In the discipline of economics today, the claim is typically included not only in the obvious results/discussion section(s) but also in three other locations of the article: the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion. The present study considers whether the rhetorical function of each of these three text parts has an impact on the linguistic realization of the claim. The corpus consists of 25 articles from two international journals, European Economic Review and Journal of International Economics. The investigation shows that economist authors commonly draw their readers’ attention to the claim by means of signaling expressions such as Our main finding is that . . . , not only in the introduction but also in the conclusion. The simple present seems to be the preferred tense in the claim sentence, even in the conclusion (We find . . . /We argue . . .). The discussion of these findings includes the views of discipline insiders, providing clear indications of the strategic nature of the research communication process.

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.