Attribution And Thematization Patterns In Science Popularization Articles Of «the Guardian» Newspaper

Resumen del Libro

This doctoral dissertation places its focus on the discourse of news media in English, which has traditionally been an attractive and fruitful source of information about language for both discourse analysts and corpus linguists. While many of the analyses have focused on scientific discourse, the alternative approach to science popularization proposed focuses on its description as a newspaper genre, placing our emphasis on the description of textual features typical of science popularization discourse. The popularization of science is normally carried out by a number of journalists who write in scientific sections and act as mediators between scientists and lay people, and who elaborate discourse through a series of linguistic and discursive choices by which they obtain credibility for the facts under comment. One of those resources is that of explicit attribution which presents discourse as deriving from someone different from the journalist, and introduces reported language events in the text. In this context, this study was created with the aim of providing the phenomenon of attribution in newspaper discourse with deeper insights that help improve the knowledge about language events reports in science popularization articles. For this purpose, a corpus of electronic versions of science popularization articles from the British newspaper The Guardian has been compiled and analysed to get data on the presence of attribution in science popularization articles and on the behaviour of language events reported, both in first paragraphs and in the rest of the text, taking into account thematisation patterns in the texts. The model of language that has been taken as reference in this study is Systemic Functional Linguistics, which focuses on how language works and conceives language as a social semiotic, also taking Discourse Analysis as the perspective adopted for the analysis of language. We have obtained relevant results on the phenomena of explicit attribution,…