Communicative and Cognitive Dimensions of Discourse on Science in the French Mass Media

Abstract

The emergence of a `new' discourse on science in connection with events to do with the environment, food safety or public health (e.g. the BSE crisis, genetically modified organisms, dioxins in chickens) has caused questions to be raised concerning the suitability of the triangular communication model generally applied to scientific popularization, i.e. in which there is an `intermediary' discourse plying between science and the general public. This `traditional' discourse would appear, then, to co-exist alongside the new discourse. The pragmatic functions of these two separate discourses on science are compared here by looking at the linguistic and discursive variations which characterize their communicative and cognitive dimensions. In the new discourse on science, which has come to light over the past few years, the strict task of `popularizing' (i.e. explaining science) appears to have been dropped in favour of explaining the social stakes of the issues in question: thus the typically didactic and scientific nature of the cognitivo-discursive category, explanation (as demonstrated in a previous research project concerning media discourse on astronomy) can be seen to make way for a different type of explanation, which uses an interdiscursive memory bank built upon the productions of the mass media destined for the general public.