Mapping Attribution across Texts: the Particle ‘according to’ in Science Popularizations and editorials from The Guardian

Abstract

The confluence of new technologies and the necessity to reach mass audiences have driven the genre of science popularization to unprecedented levels of dissemination. The popularization of science is normally carried out by journalists who write in scientific sections of newspapers and other written media and act as mediators between scientists and lay people (Gil Salom 2000-2001, 443). They achieve this aim by elaborating discourse through a series of linguistic and discursive choices that transform raw scientific facts into easily comprehensible texts (McCabe and Heilman 2007, 139). In the contrastive study we present here, we aim to contribute to a better characterization of one of these discursive choices, namely explicit attribution, and, at the same time, to identify the elements which most frequently accompany the discourse marker ‘according to’. For these purposes, we have analyzed a corpus of science popularizations and a corpus of editorials from the newspaper The Guardian, comparing the frequency of appearance of this attributive particle both in the first paragraphs, and throughout the rest of the text.