Quantitative evaluation: Types, contexts and pragmatic functions in English academic discourse of energy engineering
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu09.2024.404Abstract
The article analyses the category of quantitative evaluation in the academic energy discourse. Taking into account the semantic ambiguity of linguistic means expressing quantification, the purpose of the present paper is to determine the factors contributing to the identification and correct interpretation of the evaluative meanings. The study also aims at describing the types of quantitative evaluations in research papers in the field of energy engineering, as well as analysing their communicative and pragmatic potential in the discourse under consideration. The study is based on the corpus including 20 English research articles published in the open access in the period 2018–2024. The analytic procedure includes the following stages: identifying lexemes, nominal and verbal groups with quantitative meanings; determining their evaluative status, as well as types of evaluative meanings and their pragmatic functions; determining the most frequent types of quantitative evaluation using corpus statistical methods. The relevance of the conducted research is evident in the following results. The analysis confirms the assumption that linguistic means with quantitative meanings have significant evaluative potential; however, due to the relatively high degree of implicitness and ambiguity, identification and correct interpretation of such meanings is possible only through the analysis of the linguistics context (co-text) and extralinguistic cognitive context. Due to the application of the corpusstatistical analysis the study establishes that quantitative evaluations typical of research papers in the field of energy engineering are twofold: quantifications relating to the amount of a quality or specifying the extent (spatial and temporal) of a process, and intensification of a quality or a process. The paper also concludes that quantitative evaluations in the academic discourse of energy engineering are involved in the deployment of the discourse strategy of warranting the significance of the research (through the tactic of threat) and the strategy of advancing research results (through the tactic of presenting positive changes).
Keywords:
quantitative evaluation, academic discourse, graduation, discourse prosody, discourse strategy
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Литература
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Nefedov 2019 — Nefedov S. T. Towards evaluation in scientific reviews (based on German linguistics). Zhurnal Sibirskogo federal’nogo universiteta. Gumanitarnye nauki. 2019, 12 (10): 1868–1886.
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