Towards a theory of linguistic curiosity: applying linguistic frameworks to lingcomm and scicomm

1 Introduction

There is a considerable body of advice for writing and public speaking. Much of it repeats time-worn adages (“avoid the passive”, “don’t say um”) that linguists are understandably sceptical of, given research showing the importance of elements like passives and particles in structuring discourse. And yet it remains true that some texts and speeches are compelling and engrossing, while others leave audiences confused or falling asleep. Some of this difference is a question of individual background: an expert may be enraptured by a presentation that leaves a layperson cold. But within a relatively uniform audience of non-specialists, some explanations make the room perk up while others fall flat. Surely there are differences between these styles of communication, and surely linguists ought to be well placed to describe these differences in relation to their audiences? After all, linguists use a variety of analytical approaches to help us gain a more explicit understanding of the linguistic features that language users intuitively deploy to accomplish their communicative goals, using phonetic, lexical, syntactic, and contextual features to inform understanding of codeswitching, intertextuality, pragmatics, and more. Further, the results of such fine-grained linguistic analysis ought to be useful to those who are not yet deploying certain techniques at an intuitive level and would like to learn how to participate in a given genre.

In this article, we map out a conceptual space for applying methodologies from the field of linguistics to analyse the outputs of linguistic and, more broadly, scientific communication with non-specialist audiences (lingcomm and scicomm). To do this, we first posit an overarching communicative goal (“curiosity”); second, we provide examples of texts that meet or do not meet this goal; and third, we sketch out a preliminary analysis of how these styles of texts differ and some takeaway points of direct applicability for would-be participants in this genre. We do not claim to have described the only goal or the only methods of accomplishing lingcomm and scicomm; rather, we hope that in making a first attempt at describing these genres using linguistic methods, this article also lays out a vision for further application of linguistics to the analysis and subsequent creation of scicomm materials.

The first author coined “lingcomm” from “linguistics communication” in 2017, by analogy with “scicomm”, a common abbreviation for “science communication”, in an effort to encourage cross-pollination across these fields. Science communication is a usefully unified term referring to a set of practices that aim to “enhance public scientific awareness, understanding, literacy, and culture” (Burns et al. 2003), but we acknowledge that many other academic fields also have extensive traditions of public engagement under a variety of names, such as “public history”, “public art”, “pop psychology”, and so on. Lingcomm is part of a “big tent” approach to linguistics (Dockum and Green 2024), which is collaborative and supportive across what have been seen as traditional disciplinary boundaries.

We consider it valuable to name lingcomm as related to, but distinct from, scicomm for three reasons: one, linguistics lies at the intersection of sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and thus is not squarely grouped in any one of these fields; two, we find it a satisfactory middle ground between alternatives such as “linguistic outreach”, which centres the academic perspective, and “pop linguistics”, which centres the journalistic; and three, linguistics as the study of language can uniquely be applied to the material of lingcomm itself, as a first step on the way to broader applicability.

In this paper we reflexively draw on our own experience as lingcomm practitioners, mostly focusing on our collaborative work on the Lingthusiasm podcast (2017–). Lingthusiasm (https://lingthusiasm.com/) is a monthly 35–45-min audio-only podcast in informal conversational style. Typical episodes are lightly edited conversations between the co-authors, with occasional interview episodes. We also have monthly bonus episodes of similar length and style for patrons (https://lingthusiasm.com/patreon), whose support funds ongoing production costs. We have previously written about our use of existing frameworks and research from linguistics in the intentional design choices we make in our development of lingcomm materials: content for the Lingthusiasm podcast (Gawne and McCulloch 2023) and the Crash Course Linguistics YouTube videos that we scripted for Complexly/PBS (Gawne et al. 2024). This paper presents a second step, outlining a new model for conceptualizing audience engagement that links together lingcomm and scicomm.

2 Curiosity is the goal

In order to provide advice on how to produce language of a particular genre, it is necessary to first precisely characterize the genre under discussion and then to describe the features of the genre so identified. This is a crucial step that most communication advice ignores, instead taking for granted that all writers and public speakers have the same goals of producing, say, “clear” writing without establishing a method of identifying when writing is or is not clear. Skipping the goal and analysis steps is how we end up with writing guides from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style to Stephen King’s On Writing which produce advice to avoid passives or adverbs while the same books themselves produce many examples of passives and adverbs. Further, classic writing advice tends to assume that all language users have the same communicative goals, whereas sociolinguists and discourse analysts know that, for example, clarity may well be counterproductive for people wishing to establish themselves as in-group members by using expressions that an out-group would find obscure.

We propose that the unifying communicative goal underlying efforts to communicate academic topics to broader audiences is to incite curiosity about a topic, that is, to pull their attention into a complex topic, to maintain that attention throughout the explanation, and to leave the audience members excited to learn more about the topic and with a sense of how they could go about feeding their newfound curiosity about an aspect of the world around them. Throughout this paper we refer to the structural choices that support the goal of inciting curiosity as the “curiosity” that a text exhibits.

An initial hypothesis of scicomm might be that its goal is to teach people about linguistics, ecology, astrophysics, and so on, but closer inspection reveals that this is not quite accurate. Conveying information to the public is important but not sufficient. Indeed, ill-considered delivery can mean that a would-be target audience takes great pains never to encounter the topic again. See, for example, the case of maths phobia, where even relatively intellectual people will proudly joke about disliking maths despite it being a ubiquitous topic in formal education (Sam and Ernest 2000). Thus, even when attempting to reach audiences in formal education systems, but especially when attempting to reach audiences at liberty to pay attention to something else that is more compelling, the long-term goal must always be to make people want to keep learning about linguistics, ecology, astrophysics, and so on.

The goal of inciting curiosity differentiates scicomm from two related but distinct genres: “expert communications” and “entertainment”. Expert communications aims to disseminate knowledge efficiently between fellow experts, such as academics or practitioners who are familiar with the field (or, more typically, sub-field). It does not concern itself with inciting curiosity; rather, it operates under the assumption that the audience is already curious about the object of enquiry, already has a level of background knowledge, and desires to satisfy that curiosity as efficiently as possible. Reference works (such as Wikipedia) and academic articles are examples of expert communications. As a result of this association with expert communications, flouting curiosity can index authority or serve as a way of demarcating an in-group from an out-group, whether the associated information is accurate or inaccurate. Scholarly teaching aims to create experts who can one day participate in expert communications, by scaffolding students into the level of background knowledge that will be assumed by typical reference works, technical manuals, academic articles, and so on. While some instructors see inciting curiosity in the subject matter as part of their remit and may thus find some parts of this article useful, others, especially at the advanced level, assume that students have chosen to enrol in a particular class or read a particular textbook because they are already curious about the topic.

Entertainment aims to capture attention and provoke emotion, but it aims to direct that attention for its own purposes, such as to sell a product or to keep people coming back to have fun, more than inciting curiosity about the topic in general. In science-adjacent spaces, this can look like meme-ish “I love words/science” accounts that share spurious etymologies or “cool science pics” with a dubious relationship to accuracy and without providing sources for people who might wish to dive deeper. Of course, there are plenty of benign functions for entertainment as well, from soap operas to theme parks: chiefly that entertainment is enjoyable and relaxing. While entertainment and scicomm share many tactics for engaging an audience, they put these tactics to the service of different goals.

The same object may be approached through multiple lenses. For example, watching a firework show is entertainment, looking at fireworks while learning how they work is scicomm, and reading an operations manual for how to safely manufacture fireworks is expert communications. For the sake of clarity, we will here concentrate on these lenses in their most distinct forms, while recognizing that overlap is not uncommon. For example, an educator may spend some time in the first and last class inciting curiosity while spending the bulk of the time on conveying information designed to turn students into experts. In popular media, a movie which is mostly entertainment may hire an expert consultant to present technical aspects in a realistic way, thus potentially inciting curiosity; for example, there are students who have enrolled in a linguistics course because of a linguist character in the movie Arrival.

Curiosity as an approach to text analysis shares features with schools of linguistic analysis that look at discourse and information structure. Curiosity could be conceptualized as one dimension of Jakobson’s (1960) poetic function of language. Curiosity is also a set of choices that shares parallels with Lakoff’s (2014) model of discourse framing. The focus on paradigmatic choices and the social semiotics of discourse structures also shares elements with Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 2009). Curiosity may have some utility within a specific sub-field of linguistics, but in this paper we focus on framing it in a way that is accessible to all linguists and research communicators.

We can place curiosity in context by considering other concepts from linguistics that formalize the difference between two particular mental states when encountering specific types of language stimuli. One such example is grammaticality versus ungrammaticality. An ungrammatical sentence or phrase is, broadly, one that no speaker of a language would utter and is conventionally indicated with an asterisk (Chomsky 1957). In (1) we provide examples of three grammatical sentences and one ungrammatical sentence. The contrast in the mental state experienced between these sentences has been used to argue that different words select for different grammatical structures, since give and donate have the same meaning in this context and yet appear in different grammatical constructions.

A second example of a linguistic formalization of a mental state is the concept of felicity versus infelicity. An infelicitous sentence or phrase is one that, while grammatical in itself, is anomalous in a particular context (Austin 1962). Infelicitous utterances are conventionally marked with a hash mark, as in (2).The response You’re welcome is an expected second-pair part in (2a), but does not form a typical adjacency pair in (2b) (examples from Birner 2021). The use of the hash indicates the contrast between the mental state experiences between these pairs, and demonstrates that patterns of speech acts tend to concur irrespective of either their literal or their contextual meaning.

Comparing examples that obey and flout grammaticality and felicity is an essential tool for linguistic analysis, and giving different names to the distinct mental states associated with the reactions to these two types of stimuli is a useful tool for comparing and analysing them. Thus, when we propose that a passage may have curiosity as its goal, we also propose that a given passage may be considered curious or incurious. In the next section, we examine more closely examples of more and less curious texts.

3 Curious and incurious texts

In this section, we present a comparison of two passages that are as nearly as possible matched for topic: a Twitter thread from astrophysicist and scicommer Dr. Katie Mack (Figure 1)^[1] and a matched text from the Wikipedia article about the speed of light.^[2] The text from Mack includes: “Hold your hand up 12 inches from your face: you’re seeing your hand as it was a nanosecond ago.” The Wikipedia text conveys the same concept in a very different way: “The speed of light c is exactly equal to 299,792,458 m per second (approximately 300,000 km per second; 186,000 miles per second; 671 million miles per hour).”

Figure 1:

Twitter thread from astrophysicist Katie Mack about the speed of light.

Finding that the Wikipedia article is less curious than the Twitter thread is not to say that the Wikipedia article is ineffective at its goals. In fact, we selected Wikipedia as a comparison text because it is a readily available reference work that is largely successful at engaging a general audience. However, as a reference work, Wikipedia is often arrived at by people who are already searching for information about a given topic. For these more dedicated pursuers of information, it is more useful to lead with standard units such as metres per second rather than non-standard units like feet per nanosecond. The Twitter thread has a different goal: to make people who are scrolling through their normal social media feeds stop and pay attention and care about the topic at hand.

As a third example, we have the abstract of an academic article from Mack and colleagues (Ricotti et al. 2008).^[3] This is one of Mack’s most cited academic papers at the time of writing this article, according to Google Scholar. Just as the Wikipedia article is effective at its goals as a reference work, this academic work is effective at the goals of its genre of expert communications: over 2,000 scholars have found it worth downloading and 400 scholars have found it worth citing. To say that it is not successful at inciting curiosity among people who are not already regular readers of the Astrophysical Journal or members of the American Astronomical Society is not to say that it is defective or that the authors are bad; it is merely to say that it is an entirely typical academic article.^[4] (We note that we do not consider the present text, also an academic article, to be especially curious either, but it is overly self-referential to provide an analysis of a text as one is writing it.) Nonetheless, it is clear that the academic article does not incite curiosity even as much as the Wikipedia article does. The non-specialist reader is lost before the end of the first sentence. Taking these three texts as a baseline for analysis, in the next section we analyse the linguistic characteristics that cause these differences.

4 Features of curious texts

In this section we will analyse differences between the three texts at three levels of curiosity. We do not claim that this is an exhaustive list of features that affect the curiosity of a text, but they are features we have considered in our own work, and have found in other scicomm and lingcomm work. Choosing three texts for analysis allows us to illustrate that curiosity is gradient rather than discrete. Alongside analysis of these texts, we also provide illustrative examples of how we have made choices in our own lingcomm work on the Lingthusiasm podcast using these features. We acknowledge the format of the show is different to that of the texts analysed here, but we want to illustrate how a focus on curiosity has informed linguistic choices in our lingcomm work.

5 Implications for linguistics, and for lingcomm

In this section we briefly outline (a) how analysing scicomm can help us create better lingcomm materials, and (b) how analysing scicomm can inform linguistic theory more broadly.

Academics beginning a practice of communicating with broader audiences often express concern about how to present topics that they are deeply expert in at an engaging but not oversimplifying level. In this article, we have presented a method for training would-be lingcommers by encouraging them to pay attention to their reactions (“curiosity judgements”) to scicomm examples in areas where they do not have subject-matter expertise, and then to further apply those observations to examples of lingcomm within their expertise. This approach differs from both existing scicomm training and writing advice practices by beginning with data and extracting generalizations, rather than either presenting examples without the benefit of linguistic analysis, as is common in existing scicomm training which does not draw on linguistics, or presenting generalizations that are based in the informal judgements of the writer’s experiences without the benefit of grounding in specific data, as is common in existing writing advice. In this position paper, we have begun to focus on some key features of what we believe makes for high-curiosity work, including judicious use of terminology, structure that fits the medium, and framing that considers the participation of the audience. We look forward to future analysis which can garner curiosity judgements from a broader range of people and examples, and extract further features that influence the curiosity rating of a text.

Curiosity can not only be used as a tool for people wishing to create more engaging texts, but also as a framework for formal linguistic analysis. With the benefit of “curiosity” as a framework, we can continue to refine key elements that lead to greater incitement of curiosity. This can be done through analysis of existing lingcomm and scicomm work that has been shown to resonate with audiences, as in this paper. Exploration of curiosity can also be done using experimental methods to test how audiences react to the manipulation of different linguistic elements, in conversation with literature on persuasion and debunking (Lewandowsky et al. 2020). Even without formal study, linguists practising lingcomm can learn to reflect on their own intuitions about curiosity, along similar lines to the way in which reflecting on structural properties like grammaticality and felicity can lead to increased appreciation for humour, ambiguity, and other domains of language and social interaction.

6 Conclusions

Much has been made of the descriptive turn in linguistics across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And yet, linguists are not mere observers of language, hovering at a point in space beyond all usage considerations like the viewpoint perspective in the Wikipedia diagram of the speed of light from the sun to the earth: we are also social beings who make decisions about how to use language in our own lives. We have used the incitement of curiosity as a way of drawing together an analysis of lexical choices, information structure, and contextual framing in communications across genres. We can find ways that scicomm and lingcomm professionals regularly make linguistic choices that aim to incite curiosity in their audiences.

Curiosity as a concept allows us to move beyond the prescriptive/descriptive dichotomy, to understand why norms and prescriptions arise, and to understand how analysing language as it is used does not just result in “anything goes”. Curiosity also allows us to circumvent people’s anxiety and shame around the failure of formal education in giving them tools to understand and analyse language.

In this paper we have begun the process of operationalizing the intuitive impression that a text is compelling or engaging, a dimension of language that incites curiosity in the reader, which we refer to as the “curiosity” of a text. We have looked at some features that are hallmarks of style that has high curiosity, including limited use of terminology, genre-relevant structure, and framing that includes audiences. Formalizing the concept of curiosity allows all of us as lingcomm practitioners to develop a shared vocabulary of the intentional choices that we make in the content that we create for different audiences. It also demonstrates the contribution linguistics and lingcomm have to make to scicomm, and to a general audience’s understanding of the world in which we live.