WHAT THE MEANING MEANS.doc
Giorgio Davos
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Abstract
The omnipresence of the Media in the life of men has increased their influence in the linguistic habits and the use of specialized terms in the ordinary language of people. The introduction of neologisms is a phenomenon that goes au pair with the endless necessity of the Media to continuously produce numerous and more spectacular news. Science and technology, as well the cutting edge application of their research disciplines in other tangible fields of the human life, like medicine, biology or ecology, have disseminated new terms in the ordinary speech. Many of those neologisms, either as new terms, or as metaphorical descriptions of a more complex discovery, are already in use from million of men around the world. Their use is the upshot of a successful ‘endorsement’ of these terms, based on criteria sometimes other than their veracity, applicability and utility. These terms are derived from the specialized publications with the mediation of the Media networks. The mediation process means that every report about a new finding should be judged in order to be decided if makes a good ‘candidate for publication’, then re-interpreted in a most colloquial way to make the news and finally promoted and reiterated—depending of the amount of success such a new linguistic entity might have in the heavily mutable environment of the news. The introduction of these new terms by the media is concluded in such simplistic way that seems to obey in many tenets to the strictly psycholinguistic methods of the acquisition of a new language and the translation to another linguistic code, as well as to the intentional way of the transmission of a message according to the theory of information. The diminished value of the philosophical conditions about the truth- value or the justification of the meaning of individual terms, as well as the metaphysical upgrading of the descriptive importance of the neologisms are some of the consequences of these simplifications and generalizations. The present study examines, under the prism of an overlapping use of the theoretical instruments of the philosophy of language, sociolinguistics and sociology of the Media, the conditions that articulate the procedure by means of a cross reference of examples derived from publications on Science and Technology related articles in major News Agencies and newspapers sources. The study, by making recourse to theoretic and empirical data, tries to highlight the strategies and the hypothesis that underlie in this endeavor, which results to an ambiguous approach and hardly biased management of the original terms and descriptions provided by the science, due to the over- generalizations, simplifications and the hastiness of the Mass Media networks to transcribe even partial or non credible upshots of a research. This tendency permeates also the scientific community, which for its own reasons, of financial and internal competition, is prone to bias and computational manipulations.
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WHAT DOES THE MEANING MEANS?
The omnipresence of the Media in the life of men has increased their influence in the linguistic habits and the use of specialized terms in the ordinary language of people. The introduction of neologisms is a phenomenon that goes au pair with the endless necessity of the Media to continuously produce numerous and more spectacular news. Science and technology, as well the cutting edge application of their research disciplines in other tangible fields of the human life, like medicine, biology or ecology, have disseminated new terms in the ordinary speech. Many of those neologisms, either as new terms, or as metaphorical descriptions of a more complex discovery, are already in use from million of men around the world. Their use is the upshot of a successful ‘endorsement’ of these terms, based on criteria sometimes other than their veracity, applicability and utility. These terms are derived from the specialized publications with the mediation of the Media networks. The mediation process means that every report about a new finding should be judged in order to be decided if makes a good ‘candidate for publication’, then re-interpreted in a most colloquial way to make the news and finally promoted and reiterated—depending of the amount of success such a new linguistic entity might have in the heavily mutable environment of the news. The introduction of these new terms by the media is concluded in such simplistic way that seems to obey in many tenets to the strictly psycholinguistic methods of the acquisition of a new language and the translation to another linguistic code, as well as to the intentional way of the transmission of a message according to the theory of information. The diminished value of the philosophical conditions about the truth- value or the justification of the meaning of individual terms, as well as the metaphysical upgrading of the descriptive importance of the neologisms are some of the consequences of these simplifications and generalizations. The present study examines, under the prism of an overlapping use of the theoretical instruments of the philosophy of language, sociolinguistics and sociology of the Media, the conditions that articulate the procedure by means of a cross reference of examples derived from publications on Science and Technology related articles in major News Agencies and newspapers sources. The study, by making recourse to theoretic and empirical data, tries to highlight the strategies and the hypothesis that underlie in this endeavor, which results to an ambiguous approach and hardly biased management of the original terms and descriptions provided by the science, due to the over- generalizations, simplifications and the hastiness of the Mass Media networks to transcribe even partial or non credible upshots of a research. This tendency permeates also the scientific community, which for its own reasons, of financial and internal competition, is prone to bias and computational manipulations.
Breaking the Linguistic Norm in Mass-Media The Limits of Neology George
2019
The paper argues in favour of adopting a whole-integrating perspective to fully understand the demand for a new eco-linguistics without rejecting neology as a manifestation of the live spirit of a language. Thus students will be in the position of handling the avalanche of media terms, whose prestige raises inversely proportional to the degree of instruction of the one who produces the news, either as an agent or as an actant. We highlight the idea that beyond the journalistic value of the news as such, a more adequate selection of the linguistic support is required in more and more instances, especially into the audio-visual field. The inflation of weird or inadequate terms can compromise a piece of information or the news, either by being rejected by the receiver, or by altering the initial message. It is important to study this linguistic phenomenon, as in the case of non-native Romanian speakers, the impact is increasingly noxious since the novelty of innovation surpasses the la...
Non-native scientists, research dissemination and English neologisms: What happens in the early stages of reception and re-production?
That the English language is the prevailing language in international scientific discourse is an undeniable fact for research professionals who are non-native speakers of English (NNSE). An exploratory, survey-based study of scientists in the experimental disciplines of neuroscience and medicine seeks to reveal, on the one hand, the habits of scientists who in their research practice come across neologisms in English and need to use them in oral and written scientific discourse in their own languages, and, on the other hand, their attitudes towards these neologisms and towards English as the language of international science. We found that all scientists write and publish their research articles (RAs) in English and most submit them unrevised by native speakers of English. When first encountering a neologism in English, scientists tend to pay close attention to these new concepts, ideas or terms and very early in the reception process attempt to coin acceptable, natural-sounding Spanish equivalents for use in the laboratory and in their Spanish texts. In conjunction with the naturalized Spanish term, they often use the English neologism verbatim in a coexistent bilingual form, but they avoid using only the English term and very literal translations. These behaviors show an ambivalent attitude towards English (the language of both new knowledge reception and dissemination of their RAs) and Spanish (used for local professional purposes and for popularization): while accepting to write in their acquired non-native language, they simultaneously recognize that their native language needs to preserve its specificity as a language of science. Resumen Científicos no-nativos, difusión del conoc imiento y neolog ismos en ing lés ¿Qué ocurre en las fases más tempranas de recepc ión y reproducción? Para los científicos no nativos de inglés, la redacción de artículos de investigación en una lengua extranjera supone un reto a la hora de difundir sus resultados. En un estudio exploratorio realizado mediante encuestas a una población de neurocientíficos e investigadores médicos en España se busca descubrir, por un lado, qué hábitos prevalecen entre estos profesionales a la hora de procesar neologismos en inglés durante sus investigaciones y transmitirlos tanto verbalmente como textualmente en sus lenguas maternas y, por otro lado, qué actitudes manifiestan hacia los neologismos ingleses y hacia la lengua inglesa misma como lengua de comunicación científica. Se ha comprobado que la totalidad de los científicos encuestados escriben y publican artículos de investigación científica en inglés y que la mayoría lo hacen sin revisión nativa. Al encontrarse por primera vez con un neologismo en inglés, los encuestados dedican una atención especial a este nuevo concepto, idea o término, y en una fase muy temprana del proceso de recepción intentan acuñar expresiones equivalentes que sean aceptables, naturales y funcionales en los contextos orales y escritos donde los han de retransmitir, a menudo empleando también los neologismos primarios en inglés de forma bilingüe pero siempre evitando emplear exclusivamente el término inglés y traducciones muy literales al español. Estos comportamientos muestran una actitud ambivalente hacia la lengua inglesa (la lengua en la que llegan nuevos conocimientos y en la que estos científicos no nativos realizan la difusión de sus descubrimientos) y la española (la lengua en la que se realizan las comunicaciones profesionales más inmediatas y la popularización de sus resultados): mientras que aceptan redactar su producción científica en una segunda lengua, a la vez reconocen que su lengua materna necesita ser reconocida y conservada como lengua de expresión científica. Palabras clave: artículo de investigación científica, español, inglés para fines específicos, neologismo, neurociencia.
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This book sets out to make the reader fully acquainted with the new landscape in science and scientific discourse resulting from the era of globalisation. It widens the scope of previous research in this field: the author aims to deal not only with the so-called "hard sciences" but also with social sciences and the humanities. It has been written for the native English-speaking researcher specialised in any of the above-mentioned disciplines, as well as the plurilingual scholar who is competent in languages other than his/her mother tongue. Adopting a discourse, rhetorical and genre orientation, this book develops the author's claim that an understanding of scientific discourse is essential for the production, dissemination and reception of scientific knowledge, for both native English-speaking and plurilingual scholars. The methodological approaches adopted by the author take into consideration some of the most updated developments in the field, such as corpus and text linguistics and ethnographic perspectives. The author stresses that social and interpersonal aspects underlie the discourse of science and shows the ways in which academic genres are constantly evolving in their rhetorical conventions. This is a result of the interchange of knowledge among scientists and scholars, regardless of whether English is their mother tongue or not. The book is structured into eight chapters. Chapter 1, entitled "The Role of Science Rhetoric in the Global Village", provides an overall view of the study, addresses the existing theoretical and methodological approaches and defines the major target reader of the study. 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