LINGUIST List 22.4226
Wed Oct 26 2011
Diss: General Ling/Translation/Turkish: Çakır: 'Forms of ...'
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1. Hamide Çakır ,
Forms of Constructing Scientific Knowledge and Encoding Writer’s Stance in Turkish and English Research Article Abstracts
Message 1: Forms of Constructing Scientific Knowledge and Encoding Writer’s Stance in Turkish and English Research Article Abstracts
Date: 25-Oct-2011
From: Hamide Çakır <hamidecyahoo.com>
Subject: Forms of Constructing Scientific Knowledge and Encoding Writer’s Stance in Turkish and English Research Article Abstracts
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Institution: Dokuz Eylül University
Program: General Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2011
Author: Hamide Çakır
Dissertation Title: Forms of Constructing Scientific Knowledge and Encoding Writer’s Stance in Turkish and English Research Article Abstracts
Linguistic Field(s):
General Linguistics
Translation
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
Turkish (tur)
Dissertation Director:
Neslihan Kansu Yetkiner
Dissertation Abstract:
Scientific discourse bears some unique linguistic features. Nominalization,a meaning making mechanism used in scientific texts, (Halliday, 1994; 1998)has grammatical and semantic functions. By nominalizing a process, we areable to pack a lot of information into a nominal group and semantically,the nominalized process becomes a participant (Banks, 2005). Thus throughremoval of human agency, objectivity and anonymity are achieved(Stålhammar, 2006). The passive voice and the personification of inanimatesubjects (PGM) are other linguistic features in scientific discourseapplied to achieve impersonality and objectivity. Personal pronouns on theother hand, enable the academic writer to establish a subjective writer'sstance. Based on these assumptions, the present study attempts to analyzelexico-grammatical features in research article abstracts within theframework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), focusing specificallyon voice, personal pronouns and grammatical metaphor in the form ofnominalization and PGM to examine how Turkish and English academic writersconstruct scientific knowledge and writer's stance.
The corpus consists of 720 abstracts from the disciplines of economics,sociology, psychology, linguistics, engineering, physics, chemistry andbiology. Considering variations in scientific languages across cultures anddisciplines, this study presents an analysis of journal article abstractswritten in Turkish (n=240) and their corresponding translations intoEnglish (n=240) as well as abstracts originally written in English(n=240). The study adopts a qualitative and quantitative corpus-basedcomparative approach.
The findings indicate cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary similaritiesand differences. Turkish and English original abstracts showed a similardistribution in the use of nominalization; however the parallel textsrevealed instances of demetaphorization where implicit information in theoriginal texts was made explicit in translated parallel texts. Differencesalso emerged in the use of voice and personal pronouns. The resultsrevealed that an objective stance was established in Turkish as well as inEnglish parallel abstracts by frequently referring to agentless passivesand personification of inanimate subjects. English original abstracts,however, highlighted the authoritative stance and competition for space inthe scientific discourse community with a more frequent use of personalpronouns matched by a high use of active voice. In addition, disciplinarycomparisons revealed that abstracts in the soft sciences frequently appliednominalization, active voice and personal pronouns, whereas hard sciencesreferred more frequently to the passive voice. Consequently, it could beconcluded that lexico-grammatical choices constructing scientific knowledgeand writer's stance are determined by cultural and disciplinary writingexpectations.
Page Updated: 26-Oct-2011
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