Presentation of other people’s information in scientific discourse

The paper reflects the author’s understanding of the explanatory structure as a semantic structure with a wide range of realizations: from complex sentences with an object clause, conjunctionless complex sentences, complicated sentences with introductory words, to simple sentences. The study considers a scientific text characterized by introducing other people’s information due to its polyphonic nature. The study objective was to identify the language reflection of the authors of the scientific text when choosing one of the possible syntactic constructions. A new direction, experimental analysis of the discourse, provides opportunities to language reflection study. Fifty-two graduate students of the Faculty of Philology took part in the experiment. Fifteen professors of various humanitarian specialties were the control group. The study analyzes the scientific text authors’ choice of the method of introducing other people’s information. The linguistic experiment results are those authors’ reflections about choosing one of the possible syntactic structures to deliver other people’s information. The students were found to prefer a direct speech structure (a conjunctionless complex sentence), with the teachers choosing the construction with indirect speech for “it may break the author’s text.” The following groups of reasons for choosing a design were identified: substantive-compositional, genre, and pragmatic. A conclusion is made that the authors of the scientific text do not fully use the wide possibilities for the language system to introduce explanatory semantics and often do it unconsciously. There is a tendency to “push” the authorization mode into auxiliary text, metatext.

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