Ways of introducing judgments and sources of information in a popular science text devoted to astronomy

Abstract

The journalist’s personality acts as an intermediary between scientists and non-professional readers, whose knowledge of astronomy is limited, and the created popular science texts are a kind of communicative platform for voicing judgments. In this regard, journalists not only supplement the reader’s knowledge in an accessible form, but also open access to the voices of representatives of the scientific and astronomical community, relying on such means as direct and indirect speech, which reveal different degrees of frequency in the first paragraph of the text and in the subsequent narrating. To systematize the actual data indicating the explicit labeling of the source of information in a popular science message, the most frequent language signals that are used by journalists in order to introduce a other voice into the text (predicates that introduce direct or indirect speech) were analyzed. As a result, models and indicators of their frequency were identified, which provided an opportunity to trace the trends in voicing the expert astronomers’ opinions in a popular scientific text. It is established that the distribution of direct and indirect speech with explicit marking of the source of information in the first paragraph of the popular science text is not homogeneous. In this text segment, indirect speech is the most frequent, which allows the journalist to focus the reader’s attention on an unbiased vision of a scientific event.