Dialogic expansion and contraction in the media: intertextuality across science, education and journalism

Abstract

In this paper we explore the social and discursive process of science popularization (SP) departing from the concepts of discourse genre, recontextualization and intertextuality. We adopt an interdisciplinary perspective, associating congruent principles from Socio-Rhetorics, Systemic-Functional Linguistics and the Socio-Historical perspective of the Bakhtinian Circle. We focus on the discursive process of the midiatization of scientific research on the internet, considering 60 SP news texts in English, published online on the BBC News, Scientific American, Nature and ABC Science sites, between 2004 and 2008. Mobilization of the ideational content of science (a new research, its methodology and results) in the secondary context of the electronic jornalistic media is implemented by a recontextualization movement of (parts or whole of) texts and discourses from the sphere of scientific activity to another journalistic sphere, giving visibility to intertextuality as a continuous flux between discourse genres and contexts from the same system of production and maintenance of science. In this intertextual flux, forces of dialogic contraction and expansion are articulated, resulting in a monologic efect which evidences a traditional view of science.