The ergative perspective in contrast: the rhetorical function of the ergative perspective

in English, Norwegian and Swedish research articles in medicine

Lene Nordrum, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg

According to Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:228), the ergative model of process-participant constellations is increasing in Modern English. The ergative model includes a one-participant configuration with the Medium as the core participant (The door opens) and a two-participant configuration with an Actor and a Medium (Paul opens the door). The two alternatives are paradigmatically related. The ergative one-participant structure has been described as particularly functional for science genres, offering a different perspective of experience than the transitive system, which typically depicts man as outside the nature, or matter, he acts on (Goatly 1996). This perspective can be referred to as the ergative perspective.

In contrast to English, ergative one-participant structures are not as common in Norwegian and Swedish, but typically correspond to verbal structures with the reflexive (Norw seg/Sw sig) and/or an s-form ambiguous between passive and middle meanings (e.g. cells part corresponds to celler deler seg (cells divide REFL) or celler deles (cells dividePASS) (cf. Lyngfelt 2007; Nordrum in preparation). This difference poses interesting questions for contrastive comparisons of the three languages, both at the level of lexicogrammar and the level of discourse. Important questions are whether it is possible to talk about an ergative perspective in Norwegian and Swedish, and which Scandinavian forms can be found corresponding to the English ergative one-participant structure.

Exploring these issues, this study investigates the rhetorical functions of the ergative one-participant construction in five research articles in medicine in English, and compares and contrasts this analysis with five comparable original texts in both Swedish and Norwegian. All the articles havethe traditional Introduction, Method, Result, and Discussion (IMRaD)design of scientific discourse, and are written by native speakers. An important sub-question is whether the strong position of English as the lingua franca of science can be seen as “shining through” (Teich 2003) in Norwegian and Swedish research articles as regards the ergative perspective, even in original texts. As a method, the study tests the usefulness of the UAM tool for corpus analysis (O’Donnell 2008) in creating and annotating a small corpus for discourse-based comparative research of discipline-specific text.

References

Goatly, A. 1996. “Green grammar and grammatical metaphor or language and the myth of power or metaphors we die by.” Journal of Pragmatics 25: 537-560.

Halliday, M.A.K. and C.M.I.M. Matthiessen. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Hodder Arnold.

Lyngfelt, B. 2007. “Mellan polerna. Reflexiv- och deponenskonstruktioner i svenskan.” Språk och Stil. 17:86-134.

Nordrum, L. In preparation. “Norwegian and Swedish translations of ergative one-participant structures in English: exploring contrastive patterns in the reflexive-middle-passive domain.”

O'Donnell, M. 2008. “The UAM CorpusTool: Software for corpus annotation and exploration.” In Bretones Callejas, C.M., S. Salaberri Ramiro, E. García Sánchez, M.E. Cortés de los Ríos, M.S. Cruz Martínez, J.F. Fernández Sánchez, J.R. Ibáñez Ibáñez, N.P. Honeyman and B. Cantizano Márquez (eds),Applied Linguistics Now: Understanding Language and Mind / La Lingüística Aplicada Hoy: Comprendiendo el Lenguaje y la Mente, 1433-1447. Almería: Universidad de Almería.

Teich, E. 2003. “System-oriented and text-oriented comparative linguistic research. Cross-linguistic variation in translation.” Languages in Contrast 3(3): 187-210.

Further references:

Melander, Björn, John Swales and Kirsten Fredrickson. 1997. Journal Abstracts from Three Academic Fields in the United States and Sweden. National Culture or Genre Differences?” In Culture and Styles of Academic Discourse, edited by Anna Duszak, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.

Gunnarssson, Britt-Louise. ”On the Sociohistorical Construction of Scientific Discourse.” In The Construction of Professional Discourse edited by Britt-Louise Gunnarsson, Per Linell and Bengt Nordberg, 99-126. Longman. London and New York.