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Lidil Revue de linguistique et de didactique des langues 41 | 2010 Énonciation

Lidil Revue de linguistique et de didactique des langues 41 | 2010 Énonciation et rhétorique dans l'écrit scientifique Impersonality and Grammatical Metaphors in Scientific Discourse The Rhetorical Perspective Zohar Livnat Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lidil/3015 DOI : 10.4000/lidil.3015 ISSN : 1960-6052 Éditeur UGA Éditions/Université Grenoble Alpes Édition imprimée Date de publication : 30 mai 2010 Pagination : 103-119 ISBN : 978-2-84310-167-0 ISSN : 1146-6480 Référence électronique Zohar Livnat, « Impersonality and Grammatical Metaphors in Scientiﬁc Discourse », Lidil [En ligne], 41 | 2010, mis en ligne le 30 novembre 2011, consulté le 01 mai 2019. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/lidil/3015 ; DOI : 10.4000/lidil.3015 © Lidil Impersonality and Grammatical Metaphors in Scientiic Discourse The Rhetorical Perspective Zohar Livnat ABSTRACT Corpus-based research of scientiic articles in the social sciences in Hebrew demonstrates different kinds of impersonal constructions char- acteristic of this genre, among them various uses of grammatical meta- phors. An analysis of this data from the rhetorical perspective makes it possible to point to the rhetorical roles performed by impersonal constructions. They serve the ‘rhetoric of objectivity’ and the ethos of the credible and uninvolved researcher, and present the research as an entity independent of and separate from the researcher. The author’s absence from the cognitive actions that underlie the text, in particular the drawing of conclusions, presents the conclusions as those that any rational reader would draw given the same data. Impersonal construc- tions involve the reader in the cognitive activities that underlie the sci- entiic paper and create common ground between the writer and reader. Viewed from the rhetorical perspective, grammatical metaphors appear to be rhetorical devices that serve the entire range of goals of the author, as a member of the scientiic community. RÉSUMÉ Cette recherche, basée sur un corpus d’articles scientiiques en sciences sociales rédigés en hébreu, se donne pour objectif d’identiier diffé- rentes formes de constructions impersonnelles du genre, dont en par- ticulier l’utilisation des métaphores grammaticales. L’analyse, menée dans une perspective rhétorique, permet de dégager les fonctions rhéto- riques de ces constructions impersonnelles, mises au service de la « rhé- torique de l’objectivité » en renforçant la crédibilité du chercheur, non impliqué dans son discours. Cette absence formelle de l’auteur dans son raisonnement, en particulier dans la partie inale, donne au lecteur un * Bar-Ilan University, Israel. zohar livnat 104 sentiment d’évidence vis-à-vis des conclusions tirées de l’analyse des données. Les constructions impersonnelles impliquent ainsi le lecteur dans les actions cognitives, créant un terrain commun entre l’auteur et le lecteur. Vues sous l’angle rhétorique, les métaphores grammaticales servent les objectifs rhétoriques de l’auteur en tant que membre de la communauté scientiique. Scientiic discourse as argumentation The discourse of scientiic papers is an argumentative discourse whose purpose is to persuade the scientiic community to accept the new knowledge and arguments presented in them and make them part of the ‘scientiic knowledge’ or ‘facts’ upon which there is a consensus within the relevant discipline. An academic career in any ield is dependent on the publication of papers, and these papers must be published in peer- reviewed journals, after having been studied and assessed by members of the same disciplinary community. The researcher’s reputation is built up over time through the publication of his work and by the degree and extent to which the other members of the community cite and use it. Consequently, some evidence of the author’s effort to persuade the readers should be found in every scientiic text of this kind. Persuasion is relevant at two stages: At the irst stage the author needs to convince the editors of the journal to accept the paper for publication, and at the second the members of the disciplinary community have to accept the new arguments and make them part of the accepted knowledge base shared by that community. Because the scientiic article is a written product, the testimony to the author’s persuasive efforts is by deini- tion linguistic and textual in nature. A rhetorical linguistic analysis of the text should take an in-depth look at the linguistic details in the context of the author’s aims. Sociologists, anthropologists and histo- rians of science, such as Latour & Woolgar (1979), Bazerman (1988), Shapin (1984), among others, have provided excellent descriptions of the scientiic text from a social perspective and its role within the disci- plinary discourse community. However, a thorough examination of the linguistic items and of their unique role in scientiic discourse should naturally be the work of linguists and discourse analysts. According to the modern approach to science, in order for research to be viewed as ‘scientiic’, it must be replicable with similar results. Among the requirements of the Popperian criterion of falsiiability is the feasibility of repeating the procedure as reported by the researcher. imperSonality anD grammatical metaphorS 105 The criterion of falsiiability says that “statements or systems of state- ments, in order to be ranked as scientiic, must be capable of conlicting with possible, or conceivable, observations.” (Popper, 1963, p. 39.) As Bazerman noted, “The original report of an experiment or observation will not necessarily establish for all lookers the existence and character of a phenomenon, though the authors might wish so.” (Bazerman, 1988, p. 309.) Consequently, the authors need to create the impression that what they are describing is a stable phenomenon that can be faithfully replicated. If research is to be perceived as that which can be precisely rep- licated, it must appear to be completely independent of the identity, personality or speciic circumstances of the researcher carrying it out. To attain this end, a deliberate effort is made in scientiic discourse to diminish the researcher’s presence in the text, resulting in an ‘objec- tive’ style of writing that ostensibly enables the facts to ‘speak for themselves’. Daston (1992) suggests that the kind of objectivity that is relevant to scientiic activity is an aperspectival objectivity, which is related to the ethos of the interchangeable and therefore featureless observer. The ideal observer has no particular characteristics which interfere with the transmission of the results or the comparison between results obtained in a different place, at a different time and by different researchers. This then, creates an impression of objective reporting, the ‘rhetoric’ of objectivity. It is important to mention that disciplines in the academe are con- sidered “subcultures” (Clark, 1962) or “tribes” (Becher, 1981, p. 121), each one having its own particular qualities, norms, practices and a relatively stable rhetorical situation (Hyland, 1998, p. 20). Thus, the means by which arguments are presented, procedures enumerated, lit- erature cited, theory and data discussed can only be seen as effectively persuasive against a backdrop of disciplinary practices and rhetorical expectations (Hyland, 1998). Research in academic writing in the past decade has established that scientiic discourse is not a monolithic, uni- form form of discourse but varies according to disciplinary conventions and cultural expectations (Hyland, 2006). Research investigating Eng- lish scientiic writing has demonstrated a long list of variations across disciplines, including argumentative moves (Holmes, 1997), authorial stance (Kuo, 1999; Bondi, 2005; Groom, 2005), speech acts (Myers, 1992), pronouns (Kuo, 1999; Fløttum et al., 2006), self- citation (Hyland, 2001, 2003; Fløttum et al., 2006), hedging and mitigation (Hyland, 1998; Vold, 2006), critical and evaluative expressions ( Stotesbury, 2006), zohar livnat 106 adversatives (Fløttum et al., 2006), questions (Hyland, 2002), negation (Fløttum et al., 2006) and meta-text (Samson, 2004; Bondi, 2005). Scientiic objectivity is primarily associated with the natural sci- ences, while both its possibility and desirability in the social sciences have been the subject of controversy since the turn of the 20th century (Daston, 1992, p. 599). In the social sciences, the status of objectivity as a value in of itself is different from its position in the natural sciences. In one example, Geertz (1988) describes the strength of anthropological research as stemming from the very presence of the researcher in the research ield and the reader’s feeling that the researcher was himself “there”. At the same time, it would appear that the desire on the part of the humanities and social sciences to prove themselves as having scien- tiic validity causes them to adopt the linguistic, stylistic and rhetorical norms that historically developed in the natural sciences. One of the most important linguistic characteristics of objective reporting is its impersonal nature. Hyland (2002) noted that “imperson- ality is seen as a deining feature of expository writing as it embodies the positivist assumption that academic research is purely empirical and objective” (Hyland, 2002, p. 1095). Discussing different genres, Berman (forthcoming) notes that “the favoring of impersonal construc- tions in expository prose is a general feature of this type of discourse.” She proposes “a discourse-based continuum of impersonalization, extending out to interactive conversation at one end, via personal expe- rience and ictive narratives, to informative texts, expository discus- sions and research papers, at the other.” (See also Kupersmitt, 2006; Reilly et al., 2002.) In the following sections, I will demonstrate some of the linguistic constructions involved in creating an impersonal tone in scientiic dis- course in Hebrew, and uploads/Science et Technologie/ lidil-3015.pdf