Lexical Processes in Scientific Discourse Popularisation

Christiane Brand

ISBN 10: 3631560125 / ISBN 13: 9783631560129

Published by Peter Lang, Peter Lang Nov 2007, 2007

About this Item

Neuware -In today's informed society, the news media have taken it upon themselves to provide the general public with information that is technical in nature and was previously restricted to the scientific discourse community. This popular presentation of scientific or technical facts is of particular interest to the corpus-based study of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP). The characteristics of the specific domain texts, e.g. medical journal articles, are perceived as a potential barrier to communication by the layman and this linguistic barrier must be lowered by awareness of and adaptation to the communicative competence of the general audience. Using corpus-linguistic methodology, the present study focuses on processes on the word level, placing special emphasis on collocations and semantic prosodies. On the basis of the findings of the corpus analysis, a comprehensive model of lexical popularisation is sketched out. 228 pp. Englisch.

Seller Inventory # 9783631560129

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Lexical Processes in Scientific Discourse Popularisation
• Publisher: Peter Lang, Peter Lang Nov 2007
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3631560125
• ISBN 13: 9783631560129
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 210W x 148H x 13D millimeters 210 millimeters width by 148 millimeters height by 13 millimeters depth
• Weight: 301 grams

About this title

Synopsis

In today’s informed society, the news media have taken it upon themselves to provide the general public with information that is technical in nature and was previously restricted to the scientific discourse community. This popular presentation of scientific or technical facts is of particular interest to the corpus-based study of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP). The characteristics of the specific domain texts, e.g. medical journal articles, are perceived as a potential barrier to communication by the layman and this linguistic barrier must be lowered by awareness of and adaptation to the communicative competence of the general audience. Using corpus-linguistic methodology, the present study focuses on processes on the word level, placing special emphasis on collocations and semantic prosodies. On the basis of the findings of the corpus analysis, a comprehensive model of lexical popularisation is sketched out.

About the Author

The Author: Christiane Brand is Lecturer in English Linguistics in the Department of English at Justus Liebig University Gießen (Germany), where she obtained her Ph.D. in 2006. Her research and teaching interests include Corpus Linguistics, Language for Specific Purposes, Intercultural Communication and Second Language Acquisition.