Volume 25, Issue 6

In the study of scientific discourse, most of the linguistic literature emphasizes politeness strategies, claiming that the scientific role demands maintaining objectivity and, therefore, mitigating criticism of other scientists (e.g., Myers 1989; Hyland 1998). However, this literature is based on studies of research reports. Adversative discourse, highlighted by Tannen (1998, 2002), has received much less attention. This paper focuses on an institutionalized genre for expressing criticism. The corpus consists of 30 ‘comments’ from the two major sociological journals. In general, the findings show that, although non-contentious or polite options are available for giving criticism, the critics often chose a more confrontational alternative. For one, criticism is often directly leveled at the target (termed Judgment) rather than restricted to his/her work. Specifically, most texts cast at least one aspersion about the target’s honesty, propriety, competence, or ability to perceive. Secondly, Judgments are unhedged and, in fact, are often intensified. Lastly, sometimes discourse strategies are employed that force the reader to concur in the criticism. These practices, which leave no room for negotiating, are inconsistent with both politeness theory and the commitment to open inquiry in science. The genre of ‘comment’ apparently allows expression of the intrapersonal needs of scientists in their role as academics. There, personal goals might dictate disregarding politeness strategies, as well as adopting an adversarial rather than collegial stance to fellow scientists.

In this paper I examine an important issue for discursive research. I consider the concept of active noising to provide insight and understanding into the function it serves in interaction. Active noising is defined as deliberate, active sounds made by participants to represent something specific. This incorporates onomatopoeic terms and other extraneous noises. It is prevalent for participants to employ noises throughout my corpus of family therapy data. Noises work differently for adults and children. Children use noises as a way of orienting to conversational topic and as a way of attempting to engage in the main interaction. Active noising serves the specific function for adults in upgrading a claim by representing to the talk recipient the sounds as they were heard at the time, assisting in the authentication of the point being made.

Although the distinction between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ conjunction introduced by Halliday and Hasan (1976) is well established, mainstream studies have, with certain notable exceptions, tended to focus on ‘external’ types as the core categories and to present ‘internal’ conjunction as a relatively unmotivated set of pragmatic extensions of the core. The present paper, working within the broad framework of systemic functional linguistics (see, e.g., Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), makes the case for recognizing a more central role for ‘internal’ conjunction. Current accounts of ‘internal’ conjunction are reviewed and it is argued that the phenomenon can be defined with more precision than is done at present, even in those models that give it full weight. A more discriminating model of analysis is proposed and related to broader features of the language system. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of assigning greater importance to textual and interpersonal dimensions in descriptions of conjunction.