A Contrastive Study On The Legitimation Strategies In Soft Science And Hard Science Research Articles

As one typical representative of academic discourse, the research article has been one of the major concerns in the field of linguistics. The traditional view holds that the research article is an objective and impersonal statement of the research findings and avoid of the author’s subjective opinions. However, this is not the case. When presenting his or her research achievements in a research article, the author is simultaneously constructing the legitimation of his or her argument by adopting linguistic devices so as to convince readers.Within the framework of van Leeuwen’s discursive construction of legitimation,this thesis conducts a contrastive analysis on the legitimation strategies in soft science and hard science research articles with the purpose to reveal their differences in the employment of legitimation strategies.According to van Leeuwen, the process of language use is a process of legitimation construction. He proposes four major categories of legitimation, namely authorization, moral evaluation or moralization, rationalization and mythopoesis.Authorization refers to the legitimation by reference to the authority of tradition,custom, law, and/or persons in whom institutional authority of some kind is vested.Moralization refers to the legitimation by reference to value systems. Rationalization refers to the legitimation by reference to the goals and uses of institutionalized social action and to the knowledge that the society has constructed. Mythopoesis refers to the legitimation conveyed through narratives whose outcomes reward legitimate actions and punish illegitimate actions.The research articles constituting the corpus to be analyzed are all taken from journals collected by Wiley Blackwell, an international renowned database of research articles, with history and media representing soft sciences and materials science and chemistry representing hard sciences. The date of their publication ranges from 2011 to 2015.Based on the analysis, the findings are presented as follows:Firstly, mythopoesis occurs only in soft science research articles.Secondly, with the other three legitimation strategies, their frequency per thousand words is much higher in hard science research articles than in soft science research articles. Among them, rationalization occurs with the highest frequency.Thirdly, legitimation strategies are rarely used separately. Instead, the research articles are permeated with the combination of different legitimation strategies.The present study can be of benefit to the Chinese scholars by providing some guidance so that they are in a better position to share their research with the international colleagues in an increasingly globalized world.