The hegemonic power of science in the scientific popularization discourse

Abstract

Science popularization in contemporary French media mobilizes enunciative positions (public, industry or government) in a public debate about science (Beacco et al., 2002). However, previous analyses of science popularization news texts in English and Portuguese (Motta-Rothand Lovato, 2009; Lovato, 2010; Marcuzzo, 2011) demonstrate an almost exclusive insertion of science-related social actors’ voices. This preponderance suggests that these voices are used as an authority resource with an effect of monologism, which in turn produces a “monologue intertext”centered around science (Moirand, 2003, p. 179): strictly speaking, thereis no interaction between equipolent consciousnesses or equivalent voices (Bakhtin, 2008, p. 4-5). Based on Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough,2003) and the Appraisal System (Martin, White, 2005), in this paper we analyzethe extent to which this effect can be verified in a corpus of 30 science popularization news texts recently published in two Brazilian publications, Ciência Hoje and Galileu. The results indicate the predominance of the linguistic exponents of dialogic expansion. The constant use of modalization, citation and report shows that journalists construct the topic of these texts as an open question, inviting alternative points of view. On the other hand, we observe that the perspectives about the popularized scientific discovery are practically restricted to the scientific sphere, which in fact restricts the dialogical space in these news texts, reinstating the hegemonic power of science discourse in the discourse of scientific popularization.Key words: dialogism and intertextuality, critical discourse analysis,appraisal system, science popularization news.