| The theory of defamiliarization is one of the key theories of Russian formalism, which suggests that one of the major tasks of literature is to break people's state of automatization to things around them by means of defamiliarizing the everyday language, so as to waken people's aesthetic perception to life. This theory is used widely to analyze the literariness of different forms of literature works. Popular science article, although not a form of literature, does share some common features in language and writing skills with literature works. These features are also reflected in their titles. Therefore, devices of defamiliarization can also be found in the titles of popular science articles.This research is an empirical study on the defamiliarization in popular science article titles. 407 titles picked at random from the popular science journal Scientific American are studied in this research. In order to make the research more specific, a working definition of defamiliarization in popular science article titles is made on the basis of the theory of defamiliarization and the stylistic features of popular science articles. According to the working definition, 113 of the titles are found defamiliarized. The further study on these defamiliarized titles shows that three categories of techniques are used in the titles to achieve the effect of defamiliarization, namely, the use of figures of speech, the use of ambiguous language and the use of expressions deviating from general knowledge. There are also some specific techniques under each category, which have different effects of defamiliarization in terms of aesthetics. The result of this research reflects the stylistic features of popular science articles, which would be helpful to the reading, writing and translation of this kind of articles. |
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