Languages for intercultural communication and education

Text A
Text B
Nothing much happened . . .
No significant ophiuroid mortality
occurred . . .
ballan wrasses and flatfish ate most
of my experimental animals
the brittlestars were completely
consumed
The results were identical: predation
pressure is low
Gut content and fecal analyses . . .
confirmed the virtual absence of
predation
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Here we see some further examples of the typical language of science – nomi-
nalisation is used in both extracts but to a greater degree in Text B. The process
which can be paraphrased as
no brittlestars died
is nominalised as the phrase
‘ophiuroid mortality’ in Text B, whereas Text A uses the informal pronoun
expression, ‘nothing much’, in a full clause: ‘nothing much happened’.
Nothing ate the brittlestars
is nominalised as low ‘predation pressure’ in Text
A, and as ‘the absence of predation’ in Text B. Text A dramatises the results
through an organisation of the text that previews the findings up front, and
then gives details of them, while Text B carefully specifies the methodology
used to obtain the results. In sum, the ‘scientific’ language of Text B is
designed to objectify processes and subject them to experimentation, and
also to specify and foreground the
procedures
that ensure that the experi-
ments achieve valid results. The more ‘popular’ language of Text A retains
some nominalisation but has a higher proportion of ‘action’ verbs like ‘hap-
pened’ and it foregrounds the
results
of the research rather than the
methodology used to obtain them. Identification and comparison of the
genres shows how the language of each article is adapted to the purposes
and interests of the discourse community it serves.