Reading Science

Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science

J.R. Martin, Robert Veel, J.R. Martin, Robert Veel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134704514
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Reading Science looks at the distinctive language of science and technology and the role it plays in building up scientific understandings of the world. It brings together discourse analysis and critical theory for the first time in a single volume.
This edited collection examines science discourse from a number of perspectives, drawing on new rhetoric, functional linguistics and critical theory. It explores this language in research and industrial contexts as well as in educational settings and in popular science writing and science fiction. The papers also include consideration of the role of images (tables and figures) in science writing and the importance of reading science discourse as multi-modal text.
The internationally renowned contributors include M. A. K. Halliday, Charles Bazerman and Jay Lemke.

Part I

Discourse on science

1
Discourses of science
Recontextualisation, genesis, intertextuality and hegemony

J.R.Martin

The impetus for this particular assembly of papers comes from research conducted by Halliday, Martin and their colleagues in and around the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney through the 1980s. During this period, Halliday focused his attention on the evolution of English science discourse in professional research contexts, while Martin was more concerned with the development of science literacy in primary and secondary schools. In 1993, the publication of a collection of this work in Europe and North America (Halliday and Martin’s Writing Science: Literacy and discursive power) made their research available to a wider audience. In response to a range of feedback from colleagues in Australia and around the world it seemed appropriate in 1994 to take advantage of the visits of Charles Bazerman and Jay Lemke to Australia and organise a workshop focusing on issues arising from a range of contemporary readings of science discourse. Lemke, of course, had been collaborating with Halliday and Martin since the late 1970s—both with respect to science education and various questions having to do with semiotic theory and text semantics. Only a few Australian linguists on the other hand had an opportunity to work closely with Bazerman, inspiring though his complementary work on the social formation of Newton’s discourse had been.

In the event a two-day invitational workshop was held in July 1994 when Bazerman, Halliday and Lemke were available. At that time Martin was involved in the supervision of a range of research into science discourse in secondary school, science-based industry and popular culture—and a number of the researchers involved in this work presented at the workshop. In addition, Frances Christie reported on her investigation of science pedagogy in primary school classrooms. Approximately fifty colleagues from across Australia participated in the discussions.

Obviously the richly textured dialogue that ensued was read and enjoyed in different ways by the various participants. By way of introducing the papers in this volume, I will focus on just four of the themes which have resonated through our networks since that time: recontextualisation, semogenesis, intertextuality and hegemony.

1
RECONTEXTUALISATION

Science discourse is one of those concerns which functional linguists find interesting and which an unusually wide range of researchers finds interesting too. Understandably then, one of the most common reactions to presentations over the years has been, ‘Yes, but what about “x” (where “x” is something that hadn’t been considered)?’ Both Halliday and Martin had encountered this reaction frequently in the 1980s. For Halliday it was received as, ‘Yes, but what do we do with these ideas; what do we actually do in the classroom?’; for Martin, it was, ‘Yes, but what actually happens outside the classroom; what do scientists really do?’ At least we had each other to relay the questions to. But beyond this it was clear that the work of one school of functional linguistics on relatively canonical science research and education was limited in significant ways.

For one thing, Halliday and Martin were linguists, albeit with wide-ranging concerns. Their tools for analysis were for the most part based on functional grammar (Halliday 1985/1994) and discourse analysis (Martin 1992)—accompanied by excursions into mode (e.g. Halliday 1985/1989) and genre (e.g. Martin 1985/1989). This obviously foregrounds the linguistic over the social in the sense that the social practice of science is interpreted through language—through grammar and text structure in particular. The natural complement to a perspective of this kind is an approach that begins with the social, especially where the social is interpreted through discourse. In Australia, work on literacy in schools and on language and gender had already opened up an important dialogue between functional linguistics and contemporary critical theory (as exemplified in Cope and Kalantzis 1993; the Australian journal Social Semiotics was founded to promote this negotiation). Rhetoric however, as practised in North America, is a voice less often heard in Australia—and so Bazerman’s perspective was an especially valuable one. One of the important innovations in this book has been to recontextualise Halliday and Martin’s linguistic perspective with respect to work in rhetoric and critical theory (see especially Chapters 2, 3 and 4).

Another feature of Halliday and Martin’s work which stood in need of recontextualisation was their focus on canonical science discourse. For Halliday this was the result of reconstructing an evolutionary trajectory for science discourse in English. As chaos theory has taught us, a project of this kind, however rewarding, tends to draw attention away from side currents and dead ends, and thus tends to idealise certain kinds of science discourse as mainstream. It seemed important to recontextualise Halliday’s ‘grand narrative’ with something of the mess and mush of scientific goings-on. For Martin, the focus on the canonical had to do with analysing science discourse in educational contexts where for the most part canonical science discourse is what students are expected to learn. This kind of focus, however rewarding, raises a question as to whether other types of science discourse might be more accessible to students from other than mainstream backgrounds, and might thus provide a way into scientific practices that canonical science discourse precludes. And it raises a further question as to the nature of the relation between science discourse in the community and science discourse as it is deployed for pedagogic purposes in schools. Consequently, it was important in this volume to recontextualise Halliday and Martin’s work by looking at science discourse across a broad range of social contexts, including popular science writing (Chapter 3) and science fiction (Chapter 4), its technological deployment in science industry (Chapters 9 and 10), and its influence on social science (Chapter 11) and cognitive science (Chapter 12); and to consider more carefully the recontextualisation of science as pedagogic discourse in primary (Chapter 7) and secondary (Chapter 6) schools.

Finally, while the role of images was addressed in passing here and there in Martin’s work, the complementarity of verbiage and image in shaping science discourse was never properly developed. By the 1990s, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996/1990) had inspired some concern with the role of photographs in science texts, and their unpublished mimeo on diagrams was opening up work on figures in relation to text (van Leeuwen and Humphrey 1996, Chapter 6 this volume). Lemke’s work on science discourse as multi-modal text thus represents a crucial recontextualisation of Halliday and Martin’s language-focused account (see also Ochs et al. 1996 on language, image and activity in science discourse).

This book is by no means the last word as far as theoretical and descriptive recontextualisation is concerned. But it does demonstrate the productivity of opening up dialogue—across a range of socially and linguistically informed theoretical perspectives, across a range of institutional sites where science discourse is practiced, and across the language and image modalities through which science discourse is construed.

2
SEMOGENESIS

Another theme which the papers in this volume are designed to promote is that of language change—where this is interpreted broadly to encompass change at all levels of language, including the evolution of new forms of discourse. As a functional linguist, Halliday has been particularly concerned with semantic change (semogenesis as he terms it), and this is reflected in his description of the evolution of scientific English. Critically, his work demonstrates that changes in discourse function co-vary with changes in the grammatical resources a language makes available to construe discourse. Specifically, he outlined the ways in which nominalisation evolved as a resource for construing scientific reality as a world of logical relations among abstract entities.

In Halliday’s theory, research into semogenesis is organised according to the time frame from which change is viewed. The smallest time frame orients to change in terms of the processes by which text unfolds (logogenesis). If we broaden this time frame to take the lifetime of individual members of the species into account we reorient to change in terms of language development (ontogenesis). Beyond this, if we take a multigenerational perspective, we reorient to change in terms of cultural evolution (phylogenesis). In these terms, the focus of Halliday’s research into the evolution of scientific discourse was phylogenetic; the focus of Martin’s work (also Lemke 1990) on learning science in schools was ontogenetic; and both these strands of research depended on close readings of individual science texts as they unfold (logogenesis). These three time frames are summarised in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Time frames for semogenesis

With respect to the development of resources for nominalised discourse, Halliday suggests an important homology across the time frames—namely, that nominalised discourse tends to develop out of more concrete discourse in the history of science, in the process of science education and in science texts themselves. Obviously, for linguists, the longer the time frame, the more daunting the research—so for the most part functional linguistic research has focused on text as process (e.g. Halliday and Hasan 1976, Martin 1992). Pioneering work on language development from a functional perspective is found in Halliday 1975 and Painter 1984. Aside from Halliday’s work on scientific discourse, and some suggestive work by the Prague School on intellectualisation (cf. Gonzalez 1988), functional linguists have devoted little productive attention to phylogenesis.

Critical theory and rhetoric on the other hand are far more comfortable with longer time frames, since their tools of analysis facilitate analysis across large numbers of long texts. Where this work has been influenced by Bakhtin it is especially relevant to functional linguists’ concerns. Critical feminist studies (e.g. Cranny-Francis 1990) of the evolution of genre fiction, for example, consider entire genres (such as science fiction, romance, fantasy) in relation to entire bodies of work by several authors. Similarly, the scope of Bazerman’s 1988 study of Newton’s discourse and its social context ranges well beyond that attempted by Halliday.

As Halliday and Matthiessen (in press) have commented, phylogenesis provides the environment for ontogenesis which in turn provides the environment for logogenesis; conversely, logogenesis provides the material for ontogenesis which in turn provides the material for phylogenesis. Thus shunting across time frames is the key to a richer interpretation of semantic change—and the papers in this volume range across time frames in ways that are suggestive of a richer interpretation of science discourse. Work by Rose and Veel in particular on the correlation between levels of achievement in science education and levels of employment in science industry in the context of the change from Fordist to post-Fordist industrial organisation are especially revealing as far as the interaction of ontogenetic and phylogenetic time frames are concerned. Christie explores in some detail the relation of logogenesis (her curriculum genre) to ontogenesis (learning science). And a range of papers look in one way or another at the negotiation among discourses within a text (logogenesis) that have given birth to new fields (science fiction—Cranny-Francis; popular science—Fuller; social science—Wignell; cognitive science—Matthiessen) in much the way that technology and mathematics gave birth to science discourse in Halliday’s account. In this respect, White’s accounts of technological discourse as a discourse in its own right is of special interest.

One of the outstanding issues that remains to be explored is Halliday’s suggestion that as far as developing nominalising linguistic resources for abstract discourse is concerned (what he terms ideational metaphor; Halliday 1985/ 1994), for English science discourse has been the cutting edge. This implies that the abstract discourses of the humanities are in some sense derived from scientific discourses, in ways we do not yet understand, and that our abstract discourses for regulating populations through business and government (bureaucratic discourse) are similarly dependent on borrowed resources for abstraction. I suspect that contemporary critical and linguistic discourses need to evolve a little before we feel confident about an answer to these questions.

3
INTERTEXTUALITY

Of continuing interest in the context of this focus on language change has been the issue of what has come to be known as intertextuality and how it is modelled in functional linguistics and critical theory. The basic complementarity of approaches here has to do with reactions to Saussure’s langue/parole opposition, along two main trajectories (which I will associate here with Halliday and Bakhtin respectively). Along one trajectory, Halliday and his colleagues have extended a tradition that reinterprets langue/parole as the relation between potential and actual (technically between system and text). In this tradition, which derives from Firth and Hjelmslev, parole is reread as the instantiation of language—the manifestation of a culture’s linguistic meaning potential in text. Systemic functional linguists have been especially concerned with modelling this meaning potential as networks of choice that function as a kind of phylogenetic record of the meanings that are relevant to (or perhaps better, immanent in) any particular act of speaking or writing. Structural descriptions in the model are designed to relate, automatically and explicitly, specific texts to choices in the system which were not selected but might have been (for discussion see Halliday and Martin 1993, Eggins 1994). Important work on genre as system is reported in Chapter 9 (for further work on generic relations see the collection of papers in Christie and Martin 1997).

The manifestation of system in text in Halliday’s model is referred to as instantiation—which has to be interpreted as a dialectical process, since instantiation continually manifests, construes and reconstrues the meaning potential of a culture. Following Matthiessen (mimeo) we can productively interpret instantiation as a cline—a gradual foreclosing of options until those selected for a particular text are specified. Register and genre theory, for example, (as outlined in Eggins and Martin in press) is designed to make predictions about which meanings of the total meaning potential of a language are at risk in particular contexts of situation. Narrowing this, we might consider the meanings taken up across a group of texts instantiating one or another register or genre (Firth’s ‘generalised actual’). Finally, there is what Matthiessen refers to as the instantial system—the set of meanings manifested in a specific text. The challenge is to build a model which reads instantiation as a two-way process, so that the system can be seen to rework itself (to evolve) as required through the momenta of innumerable instantiations. Research towards a model of this kind is reported in Halliday 1991, 1992 a, b, c, 1993a, b, Nesbitt and Plum 1988 (see also Lemke 1995 and the many references to his related work cited therein).

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Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• PART I: DISCOURSE ON SCIENCE
• PART II: POPULARISING SCIENCE
• PART III: RECONTEXTUALISING SCIENCE
• PART IV: DISCOURSES OF SCIENCE