Subject framing of popular scientific and pseudoscientific linguistic articles

Purpose: The paper aims to compare the subject framing of popular science and pseudoscientific linguistic articles. By the term ‘subject framing’ textual subject are meant in their relations to language (as an object of description) and to the situation of communication. Finding out and classification of the textual subjects are carried out taking into account a) characteristics of the communicants in the framework of popular science and scientific sphere of communication (the latter is taken only for pseudoscientific texts, for their authors argue against scientists) and genres of popular science article and scientific discussion belonging to them, and b) possible relations of the communicants to language as a linguistic object (language speaker, researcher, etc.). Subject framing arrangement is regarded to be means of implementing the informative and. especially, the affective target (i.e. awakening and maintaining the reader’s interest) of texts. Results: Analysis, based on researches on narrative, helped to reveal explicit markers of subject framing of the texts and to identify them with the situation of communication. Plane of expression of the subject framing (the markers) embraces unit naming persons, their actions and linguistic means of modal relations, in contrast to dictum, ‘objective’ ones, and some logic relations that are also partially subjective. Based on characteristics of the spheres of communication and genres, the found textual subjects were divided between micro plots - text fragments revealing particular types of the communicants’ relations to the language (except proper communicative relations) - ‘researching’, studying etc. micro plots. Then, the plot structures of popular scientific and pseudoscientific articles in relation of the plots to the communicative situation were compared. Conclusion: Plane of expression and structure of micro plots of popular scientific and pseudoscientific articles appeared to be similar. However, their subject framing is considered to be essentially different. Firstly, pseudoscientific texts are ‘double-addressed’: except non-specialists, they are to be read by linguists. Consequently, this type of articles combines two genres - popular article (like popular scientific article) and scientific polemic article. Then, the presentation of information in pseudoscientific articles is ‘primary’, instead of that in popular scientific texts, where scientific content is adapted to general variety of the literary language.