Scientific & Technical Texts: Features & Types
Scientific and Technical Texts
Main Objective
The main objective of scientific and technical texts is to report on the activity and progress of science and technology.
Communicative Features
Communicative traits of scientific and technical texts are influenced by the following:
- Goal of Communication: The primary purpose is the transmission of knowledge.
- Communicative Situation: The specific conditions that influence language and discourse features. Examples include formal situations between professionals, a college class, or an interview in the lay press.
- Transmitters and Receivers: These are specialists who are knowledgeable about the subject matter. Receivers can be specialists or the general public. If both are specialists, they share a certain degree of information on the area of knowledge.
- The Issue: Limited to their own field of specialty, formal, and conceptual. Science is multifaceted, covering different areas of knowledge like chemistry, physics, and linguistics. Each area determines the representation of reality with its own models, methods, procedures, and specific use of language.
- The Code: It consists of general language (morphology, syntax, and part of the lexicon) and the code of the field, with specific terminology that shares traits with common language and formal registration.
- The Channel: Depending on the situation, it may be the air (a class, a lecture), paper, audiovisual, or electronic media.
Types of Scientific and Technical Texts
Communicative intention and the situation determine the different types of texts, each with a characteristic organization:
Scientific Texts (Written by and for Specialists)
- Scientific journal articles
- Reports
- Reviews
- Theses
- Monographs
- Speeches
- Manuals
- Research projects
Factual Texts (Not Necessarily Directed to Specialized Receptors)
- Instructions for use of a technical material
Scientific Discourse
Scientific and technical texts utilize textual and linguistic resources appropriate to the various communication needs:
- Description: (processes, objects, beings)
- Explanation: (of concepts, phenomena, methods, or procedures)
- Explanation combined with arguments: (hypotheses, theories, issues, research results)
- Narration: (of experiments, advances, or scientific discoveries)
The coherence and consistency of statements in a scientific text are related by their meaning and are always subordinate to the topic. The pre-assumptions (knowledge assumed by the receiver about the subject) and the frame (the situation, communicative purpose, and type of scientific text) determine the consistency and must meet the expectations of the receiver. Discourse markers and indexical expressions are particularly relevant.
Discourse Markers
Connectors
Link parts of the text: additives (besides, even), straight (so, therefore), and counter (instead, though).
Structuring of Information
Point to the organization of the text. Explanatory markers (i.e., that is) are used, especially in educational texts.
Reformulation
Restate what has been said in a more appropriate way.
Argumentative Markers
Reinforce an argument (actually, in fact) or introduce an example (in particular, for example).
Morphosyntactic Features
Scientific discourse reflects the objectivity and validity of science. Its purpose is to avoid expressive elements, references to the issuer, the presence of the receptor, and persuasive resources.
Kinds of Sentences
- Prevalence of declarative sentences.
- Use of interrogative sentences with a didactic purpose.
- Sentences that avoid expressing the agent, both impersonal and passive reflex.
With the same intention, substantive use of adverbial and built personal forms of the verb. Semi-combinations of vocabulary or phraseology of the specialty: a mystery clear, analyze a sentence.
Nominalizations
- Preferred use of nouns and nominalizations: classification, adding.
- Nominalized qualities: embodiment, viscosity.
Tenses and Modes
- Use of the indicative mode (objectivity) and the timeless present, as science proposes general laws.
- Use of conditional to express hypotheses.
- Employment of verbal forms of obligation when the text specifies limit values, prescriptions, test results.
Verbal Person
- Prevalence of the third person to expose impersonality.
- The use of the first-person plural often has a didactic purpose, being a plural of modesty or a generalization that involves the reader.
The tendency to impersonality of speech does not imply the absence of modalizations or elements that express the speaker’s viewpoint.
Adjectival Resources
- Employment of specified adjectives, descriptive, and relationship or affiliation.
- With the same function, there are many adjacent prepositional and adjectival subordinate phrases that specify and explain.
- Accumulation of modifiers.
Lexical-Semantic Features
These texts are characterized by the use of specific terminology and the presence of semantic phenomena like hypernymy, hyponymy, and antonyms.
There are plenty of technicalities, which are expressions peculiar to an area of knowledge. Factual texts are classified by reference to the receiver, depending on their level of expertise. In factual texts, information is more general, and a theme is developed through exposition mechanisms: definitions, analogies, cataphoric references (anticipating the subject), examples, and questions.
Linguistic Features
The issuer may be a specialist or a mediator (e.g., a journalist). However, it is most common for the third person to be used, along with opinion verbs.