La descripción en el discurso de divulgación científica

Abstract

This paper deals with a little studied topic in the analysis of popular scientific discourse: the description. The objective is to delimit in a qualitative analysis the descriptive sequential organization in a corpus composed of six Mexican articles of popular science. To do this it was necessary to delimit the descriptive sequences; the narrative sequences and the sequences of reported speech; using criteria set forth by Charaudeau (1992); J. M. Adam & C. U. Lorda (1999); and J. M. Adam (2000). The results show that in this corpus “description” predominates (55.52%). Referred discourse represents 22.42% of the corpus and is clearly used as a strategy for establishing credibility; while the narrative sequences represent only 15.74%. These results suggest a hypothesis for further research: that is; the more homogeneous the public for scientific popularization; the smaller the space dedicated to description and; by contrast; the more heterogeneous the public; the greater the space given over to description.