‘In this paper we report …'’: Speech acts and scientific facts

Abstract

In a collection of fifty related articles in molecular genetics, most had one introductory self-referential sentence that had (1) a first person pronoun, (2) a present tense verb, (3) most often report, (4) with a nominal complement, and (5) an adverbial referring deictically to the present or the paper itself. A typical sentence of this type is: ‘ In this paper we report the finding of a novel mechanism of RNA processing’. These sentences mark each article's main knowledge claim, the assertion that the authors do not attribute to anyone else and for which they hope to be cited. Though they are not performative utterances (the sentence just quoted does not itself report the novel mechanism) they share some features of explicitly marked assertive speech acts, and raise some of the same issues concerning the form and status of assertions of fact. Different choices of verb and tense make for different assertions and different kinds of knowledge. In the texts studied, these self-referential introductory statements can be recognized in contrast to the other declarative sentences before or after them by the shifts in subjects, verbs, tenses, or the use of deictic expressions. A comparison to claims in another discourse, that of linguistics, suggests how pragmatic analysis of texts may contribute to an understanding of social acts in the production of scientific knowledge.