Features of modern popular science discourse

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of modern popular science literature in order to identify some lexical and stylistic features, as well as to figure out the specificity of the methodology of nowadays scientific and popular information presentation. The authors pay special attention to studying of undeclared implicit discursive elements of popular science texts. Printed versions of books with a total volume of 196,6 conventional printing sheets serve as a material of the study. The analysis of the material showed that the authors of popular science books try to increase the degree of trust of the audience in a variety of ways, for example, by making the process of communication with the reader more intimate, by demonstrating the proximity to official academic community and by positioning the produced text as scientifically significant. One of the most typical phenomena that has been noted in the popular science texts is making some lexical units (including terms) hypersubjective in relation to the context (and their future use in a variety of situations) together with the creation of implicit ideological pressure, as well as with the persistent demonstration of the universality of these lexical units. In all the texts that have been analysed, the unobvious discourse-forming telelogy is noted, which is a tool for soft promotion of meaning-forming and partly ideologically conditioned ways of understanding various facts. Typical of the analysed popular science literature is the presence of reduced argumentation with unjustified usage of the third-party axiomatics and the extension of the argumentation base to the interdisciplinary junction. The use of primitivized argumentation targeted for a dilettante philistine level is noted. It is not uncommon to omit the existing scientific and relevant links and patterns, or to interpret them in a way that does not contradict the information certainty projected in the text. It is also possible to note a distracting informational redundancy, which the authors of the article consider as one of the ways of splitting the text, deliberately created by the addressee of the text.