Abstract
Distinguishing certain and uncertain information is of crucial importance both in the scientific field in the strict sense and in the popular scientific domain. In this paper, by adopting an epistemic stance perspective on certainty and uncertainty, and a mixed procedure of analysis, which combines a bottom-up and a top-down approach, we perform a comparative study (both qualitative and quantitative) of the uncertainty linguistic markers (verbs, non-verbs, modal verbs, conditional clauses, uncertain questions, epistemic future) and their scope in three different corpora: a historical corpus of 80 biomedical articles from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) 1840–2007; a corpus of 12 biomedical articles from BMJ 2013, and a contemporary corpus of 12 scientific popular articles from Discover 2013. The variables under observation are time, structure (IMRaD vs no-IMRaD) and genre (scientific vs popular articles). We apply the Generalized Linear Models analysis in order to test whether there are statistically significant differences (1) in the amount of uncertainty among the different corpora, and (2) in the categories of uncertainty markers used by writers. The results of our analysis reveal that (1) in all corpora, the percentages of uncertainty are always much lower than that of certainty; (2) uncertainty progressively diminishes over time in biomedical articles (in conjunction with their structural changes–IMRaD–and to the increase of the BMJ Impact Factor); and (3) uncertainty is slightly higher in scientific popular articles (Discover 2013) as compared to the contemporary corpus of scientific articles (BMJ 2013). Nevertheless, in all corpora, modal verbs are the most used uncertainty markers. These results suggest that not only do scientific writers prefer to communicate their uncertainty with markers of possibility rather than those of subjectivity but also that science journalists prefer using a third-person subject followed by modal verbs rather than a first-person subject followed by mental verbs such as think or believe.
Highlights
Distinguishing certain and uncertain information is of crucial importance both in the scientific field in the strict sense and in the popular scientific domain
By adopting an epistemic stance perspective on certainty and uncertainty, and a mixed procedure of analysis, which combines a bottom-up and a top-down approach, we identified the uncertainty markers and their linguistic scope in 80 scientific articles from the British Medical Journal, randomly selected from 1840 to 2007, in order to test whether the rate of certainty and uncertainty was changed or has remained stable over time
In no-IMRaD articles, the uncertainty is 20% and certainty 80%. This means that IMRaD articles are less uncertain than no-IMRaD ones and such a difference is statistically significant
Summary
Distinguishing certain and uncertain information (i.e. factual vs. speculative, hedged, mitigated information) is of crucial importance both in the scientific field in the strict sense and in the popular scientific domain. Choi et al [23] compared scientific and popular articles regarding the GMO debate and suggesting that hedges occur less frequently in scientific discourse than in popular text Their findings are consistent with those of Schmied [24], who compared scientific and popular medicine articles, observing that more than double the number of lexical hedges occourred in the latter. These results do not support previous findings [25,26,27,28,29] according to which hedges are more abundant in research articles rather than in their popularized versions
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