Metadiscourse diversification in English and Italian scientific magazines

This contribution proposes a comparative exploration of the use of some metadiscourse resources in a small corpus of texts from popular scientific magazines in English and Italian, namely Scientific American (henceforth SA) and Le Scienze (henceforth LS). Scientific popularization is a meeting point of different discourse communities with their own needs, intentions and modes of communication (see Calsamiglia 2003, Myers 2003, Gotti 2005, 2013). Metadiscourse (cf., among others, Crismore and Farnsworth 1990, Crismore, Markkanen, Steffensen 1993, Hyland 1998, 2005) can be modulated and can modulate communication in different ways, as it covers a variety of linguistic elements which are aimed at organizing the text for its readers – the interactive dimension – and at engaging them in exposition and argumentation – the interactional dimension (see Hyland 2005). Recent research (e.g. Neff and Dafouz 2008, Musacchio and Ahmad 2009, Musacchio and Palumbo 2010, Suau 2010, Masi 2013) has indeed pursued comparisons of metadiscourse devices associated with scientific discourse domains and genres of popularisation in different languages to appraise the extent of cross-linguistic correspondence and avoid, for example, inappropriate translations. Special attention is here devoted to both interactive and interactional devices of metadiscourse, i.e. the representation of scientific and non-scientific ‘actors’ (cf. Calsamiglia 2003, Calsamiglia and López Ferrero 2003) through a range of acts of reporting as evidentials, i.e. the most explicit form of inclusion of other-discourse/voice in one’s discourse, as well as through a selection of self-mention and engagement markers lending themselves to quantitative along with qualitative evaluation. Altogether, the variety of items under analysis can be viewed as representing the three axes (third person reference vs. I/we vs. you) for the construction and evaluation of the roles of different identities (including text producer and implied target receiver) in scientific popularisation. Language diversification, then, is here tackled both from the intra-linguistic standpoint of the different construction of identities within a form of media discourse, and from a cross-linguistic viewpoint, i.e. the extent to which such constructions differ in the two language samples in question, in the attempt to ultimately detect possible preferential metadiscourse strategies that are specific to each language represented in the corpus. The macro-analytical background presupposed by the works here referred to (in particular Calsamiglia and López Ferrero 2003) is that of Critical Discourse Analysis, although the implications of the present research are also relevant for the perspective of Language Variation (and, to some extent, for Translation too).