Characteristics of Scientific and Technical Texts

Scientific and Technical Text Features

• Objectivity: These texts are only interested in facts and reality itself.
• Universality: The content and expression attempt to reduce cross-linguistic differences to a minimum.
• Expository Clarity: Language is used as a tool to facilitate access to knowledge of great complexity in general.
• Accuracy: A constant search for the highest level of precision.
• Specialized Lexicon: A revised vocabulary designed to generate new terms.

Pragmatic Aspects of Technical Discourse

1. Prevalence of Functions: There is a dominance of referential functions (objectivity) and metalinguistic functions. At times, conative functions may be present in instructional texts.
2. Textual Modes: Predominant modes include argumentation, exposition, description, and prescription. Each is related to the four basic types of scientific and technical texts:
   • Scientific demonstrations
   • Explanations of concepts and theories
   • Technical descriptions
   • Technical instructions
3. Recipient Function: A distinction is made between specialized texts and informative texts.

Morphosyntactic Issues in Scientific Writing

1. Declarative Mode: There is a prevalence of the indicative mood, given the objective nature of the communication. The subjunctive is reduced to the formulation of hypothetical statements. Admonition occurs exclusively in instructional texts.
2. Parts of Speech: Among the parts of speech, the noun is most important. Adjectives are fundamentally specificative.
3. Objectivity and Speaker Concealment: To maintain objectivity, the speaker is often concealed through:
   • The use of impersonal, passive, reflexive, and passive periphrastic sentences.
   • Nominalization: A preference for nominal structures instead of personally relevant verbs. To address a process, a verb is often replaced by an abstract noun.
   • The use of the plural of modesty (e.g., "We refer" instead of "I mean").
4. Gnomic Present: Use of the present tense to state laws of universal value.
5. Explanatory Constructs: To achieve greater clarity, many explanatory structures are used, such as:
   • Relative clauses and clauses between commas, dashes, or parentheses.
   • Explanatory coordinators introduced by markers such as "that is" or "namely."
6. Paragraph Structure: A trend toward extensive and well-delimited paragraphs.
7. Discourse Markers: In relation to the goal of clarity, there is an abundance of logical discourse markers (opposition, consequence, cause, etc.).

Lexicosemantic Issues and Terminology

1. Register: Use of a cultivated language level and formal register.
2. Technical Terminology: The use of techniques that create unequivocal and universal terminology. Procedures for creating technical terms include:
   • Bypass
   • Composition, especially using Greek and Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes
   • Adnominal structures
   • Acronyms and abbreviations
   • Loanwords
   • Specialization of terms from ordinary language
   • Eponyms
3. Formalized Languages: The use of universal symbols or formalized languages.
4. Denotative Language: The use of purely denotative language.