Creation and subsequent usage of terms for discourse purposes in the scientific research article
Academic texts, and the research article in particular, are constructed in a highly-constrained discourse context, for a very specific academic community. This development of specialized language with specific discourse purposes has become a popular object of study for linguists during the last 20 years.
In scientific texts, it is the nominal group that has the greatest number of possibilities for semantic and syntactic realization. The scientific “object” is named - the Head word – and this Head gradually acquires supplementary properties as the experimental work unfolds, in the form of Modifiers and Qualifiers. This additional information can then be integrated into the Head in the form of complex or compound terms, eventually becoming lexicalised items.
This terminology becomes part of the sociolect (the variety of English used by this specific speech community, here scientific researchers) and the terms thus created will be understood, recognized and re-used by members of the particular discourse community - even if these complex constructs, combining acronyms, abbreviations and new meanings, often mean nothing (have no meaning) for the general reader. It is the semantic system of the cultural context that gives meaning to these terms.
However, there are other terms created as the text is produced which may not be nor become the terminology of that specific community. Starting from previous work on this subject, and using a corpus of articles from engineering journals called the “Transactions” of the IEEE , I shall show how terms are created dynamically for discourse purposes. I shall also demonstrate how these terms acquire additional properties and how they function in the text, building up knowledge through the construction of more and more complex groups. I shall contrast these productions with those of Non-Native Speakers having French as their mother tongue, also writing for publication. The latter group of researchers tend not to construct their complex nominal groups discursively, but present pre-conceived complex terms for which the reader has not been prepared in the foregoing text, making comprehension difficult.
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