Models of representing an astronomer’s voice in a journalist’s popular judgment

• Main Author: Svetlana V. Bylkova
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Publishing and Printing Center NOSU 2021-06-01
• Series: Актуальные проблемы филологии и педагогической лингвистики
• Subjects: popular science text; author’s judgment; source of information; direct speech; indirect speech
• Online Access: http://philjournal.ru/upload/2021-2/199-211.pdf

Within the framework of this article, the starting point of the research is the theoretical position, according to which reports on discoveries and achievements in the field of astronomy appear as a frequency phenomenon, covered in specialized popular scientific texts. As a result, a pragmatic analysis of the source of information and ensuring access to the voices of astronomer researchers in a journalistic report is an urgent problem. The personality of the journalist acts as an intermediary between scientists and non-professional readers, whose knowledge of astronomy is limited, and the created popular science texts are a kind of communication platform for voicing the judgments that are put forward by representatives of the astronomical communities. In this regard, journalists not only supplement the reader’s knowledge in an accessible form, but also open access to the voices of representatives of the scientific and astronomical community, relying on such means as direct and indirect speech, which reveal different degrees of frequency in the first paragraph of the text and in the subsequent presentation. To systematize the actual data indicating the explicit labeling of the source of information in a popular science message, the most frequent language signals that are used by journalists in order to introduce a «foreign» voice into the text (predicates that introduce direct or indirect speech) are analyzed. As a result, models and indicators of their frequency were identified, this, in turn, provided an opportunity to trace the trends in voicing the expert astronomers’ opinions in a popular scientific text. It is established that the distribution of direct and indirect speech with explicit marking of the source of information in the first paragraph of the popular science text is not homogeneous. In this text segment, indirect speech is the most frequent, which allows the journalist to focus the reader’s attention on an unbiased vision of a scientific and astronomical event.