Signes graphiques et reformulation dans le discours de vulgarisation scientifique: analyse d'un corpus comparable français, italien, anglais

Abstract

This contribution aims at analyzing colons, commas, brackets and dashes in English, French and Italian discourse of scientific popularization. Actually, these markers have been studied as forms of reformulation of scientific concepts. Our corpus is composed of texts of the American magazine Scientific American and of those of its French and Italian counterparts, Pour la science and Le Scienze. For their comparison, we have adopted both a syntactic and a semantic approach. The first one has dealt with the distribution of the punctuation markers in the sentence and the conditions allowing their analogies with the reformulation markers. The second one has focused on the analysis of the terminology on the basis of the distinction between terms in usage and in mention and between ``dénominaton de fait'' et ``dénomination de droit'' (Petit 2001). The comparison of the three magazines has shown that they have evolved in an independent way.

Keywords

• scientific popularization
• punctuation markers
• reformulation
• discourse analysis