This article critiques the `dominant view' of the popularization of science that takes it as a one-way process of simplification, one in which scientific articles are the originals of knowledge that is then debased by translation for a public that is ignorant of such matters, a blank slate. Recent work is surveyed in several disciplines that questions the boundaries of scientific discourse and genres of popularization: who the actors are, how the discourses interact, what modes are involved, and what is (...) communicated. Implications are drawn from these studies for discourse analysis. (shrink)

Governmental organizations funding science m several nations are creating large research centers that draw on several disciplines and that focus research on an area of immediate use to industrial concerns. I analyze eight proposals for a U.K. center devoted to human communication. I argue that the boundaries that such a center seeks to cross— between areas of knowledge, between disciplines, between academic and nonacademic research—are constructed in the proposals for strategic purposes m the immediate situations. The study supports other recent (...) work on the crucial role of texts as interme diaries in the science policy processes, and on the need to recognize the unexpected contingencies and unintended consequences of textual circulation. (shrink)

Place is central to many research projects in the social sciences, but it is often taken by researchers as a given. Recently, discourse analysts have devoted more attention to the construction of place in interaction. We focus on one aspect of this construction, the process of drawing inferences from place categories and place names, in transcripts of oral history interviews. We apply membership categorization analysis to descriptions of house types and houses, showing how some categories are presented as being shared (...) and recognizable, and how inferences are projected. Then we apply a similar approach to the ways inferences are drawn from place names, focusing especially on proximity. Participants’ categories can be investigated by examining the ways they are used in question–answer pairs, and in the construction of turns using elaborations, contrasting pairs, negatives and qualifications. This analysis shows the work these place references do for the participants, for instance, in categorizing themselves and others and giving accounts for behaviour. (shrink)

[Translator's]: The flight of Voyager 1 past Saturn in 1981 provides an occasion for a semiotic comparison of reports in French newspapers, a popular science article, and specialized scientific articles in Nature. The texts differ in the distance supposed between reader and writer, in the treatment of human and nonhuman actors, in characterization of the event and assumptions about readers' interest in it, and in their narrative structure. The analysis shows that popular izations and specialized scientific articles are not related (...) in a simple dichotomy or scale and cannot be explained by a notion of the "general public"; rather, the various types of texts must be considered in terms of more complex relations between what are called in semiotic terms the enunciator and the enunciatee. (shrink)

The ArgumentStylistic analysis of an admittedly speculative scientific article can suggest what is involved in the social act of speculation. Walter Gilbert's influential paper “Why Genes in Pieces?” serves as an example of the conflicting demands of the need to display politeness and the need to display the urgency and excitement of the issues. Socially significant stylistic features emerge in comparison with another paper Gilbert co-authored, where the speculations occur in the discussion section of an experimental report, and in comparison (...) with another, more typical “News and Views” article by another author. The stylistic features include the use of impersonal subjects, the hedging of verbs, the unusual uses of the present tense, and the reliance on repetition, rather than conjunctions or pronouns, for textual cohesion. Later references to the article assimilate it to various lines of research without suggesting its speculative style. (shrink)