Argumentative Characteristics of Popular Scientific and Academic Scientific Texts in Economic Discourse

摘要

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of linguistic argumentation. Despite the numerous and multidimensional studies of text/discourse, the argumentative characteristics of the text remain poorly understood. The present study is an analysis of academic scientific and popular scientific texts of economic discourse from the viewpoint of their argumentative organization. Its objective is to specify the character of the textual category of argumentation and to establish its peculiar properties in academic scientific and popular scientific texts of economic discourse. Unlike most researchers, who interpret the argumentation with an emphasis on the logical (evidentiary) side of this phenomenon, the authors consider the argumentation as a universal framework for the process of constructing and transmitting knowledge, the main way of speech influence on the information recipient. This interpretation is possible when distinguishing between a broad and a narrow approach to argumentation. By argumentation in a broad sense, the authors mean a communicative process that accompanies any informatively meaningful speech unit and acts as a universal way of transferring knowledge in discursive activity. Argumentation in the narrow sense is identical to the proof by arguments. The study reveals that the three main aspects of argumentation - factual, logical, and rhetoric - are manifested more evenly in the texts from popular scientific articles.