Género, sexualidad y embarazo adolescente

According to SFL, register variety can be regarded as a continuum of variation throughout all possible settings of the parameters field, tenor, and mode. However, the differences among genres are expected to be more discontinuous and not as easily analyzed along a continuum as register variation. Biber & Conrad summarize the relations between RAs and their individual sections, which they call a case of embedded genres, as follows:

[. . . ] there are cases where genre is embedded in a larger genre. For example, introductory sections in scientific research articles can be analyzed as a genre [. . . ] with its own conventional structure. Form this perspective, the entire introductory section would be regarded as a complete text. These texts represent the genre of “Introduction” be- cause they conform to the expected conventional organization [. . . ]. At the same time, research article introductions are embedded in the larger genre of scientific research article, which has its own con- ventional structure (e.g., being organized as Abstract, Introduction,

Methods, Results, Discussion). (Biber & Conrad 2009: 33)

The main goal of this work is to gain insight into the linguistic charac- teristics of abstracts in direct comparison with their respective RAs, and to find differences and similarities between them. Hence, finding significant differences regarding the distribution of linguistic features characterizing field, tenor, and mode between abstracts and RAs would imply that they represent different variations of language, at least different registers, or con- ceivably different genres.

2.6

Envoi

This chapter has presented and discussed the state-of-the-art linguistic re- search on abstracts and RAs. First, an overview on the historical develop- ment of RAs and abstracts has been provided, thereby naming the most rel- evant research performed so far. Subsequently, the most frequently adopted approaches to the linguistic analysis of RAs and abstracts has been intro- duced, followed by a discussion on the choice of the most appropriate ap- proach as theoretical background of this research. Finally, the controversies involving the concepts of genre and register has been addressed in connec- tion with the linguistic model proposed by the theoretical underpinnings of this research.

In order to achieve the goals of this research, linguistic features are to be identified and analyzed that characterize abstracts and RAs, ideally, as

2.6. Envoi

different registers. Hence, the concrete design of this research should be rather quantitative than qualitative; the chosen linguistic features are to be extensive enough in order to allow a broad characterization of the texts under study according to field, tenor, and mode of discourse. The analysis of these features should comply with the current methodological approaches in corpus linguistics; and finally, the results are subjected to statistical veri- fication. Hence, Chapter 3 presents and discusses methodological aspects in current linguistic research, setting the scene for the methodology adopted in this research.

Chapter

3

Empirical methods in linguistics

This chapter addresses some issues concerning the methods adopted in cur- rent linguistic research. First, a brief overview on empiricism in linguistics is given in Section 3.1. Then, the empirical methods adopted here, from the area of corpus linguistics, are introduced in Section 3.2 together with an exploration of its advantages and disadvantages. Thereafter, Section 3.3 examines the synergies between corpus linguistics, as a methodology, and SFL, as theoretical background for linguistic research on language varia- tion. Finally, Section 3.4 discusses the issue of statistical evaluation of the obtained linguistic data.

3.1

Empiricism in linguistics

Empiricism can be defined as “an approach to a subject (in our case lin- guistics) which is based upon the analysis of external data (such as texts and corpora7_{)” (McEnery & Wilson 2001: 198), in contrast to rationalism,}

which is based upon introspection, i.e., for the field of linguistics, native speakers of a language who make theoretical claims about this language based on their reflections8_.

7_{The term corpus and its plural, corpora, are defined and discussed in Section 3.2.}

8_{Fillmore (1992: 35) describes linguists, who “think” their examples, as follows: “A}

caricature of the armchair linguist is something like this. He sits in a deep soft com- fortable armchair, with his eyes closed and his hands clasped behind his head. Once in a while he opens his eyes, sits up abruptly shouting, ’Wow, what a neat fact!’, grabs his pencil, and writes something down. Then he paces around for a few hours in the excitement of having come still closer to knowing what language is really like. (There isn’t anybody exactly like this, but there are some approximations)”.

3.1. Empiricism in linguistics

The distinction between the empirical and the rational approach to a subject is not a privilege of linguistics, but theoretically exists in any field of scientific research. However, for the discipline of linguistics there is one per- son responsible for the major discussions involving this natural dichotomy, Avram Noam Chomsky (cf. Chomsky 1957, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1975, 1984, 1988). It is not the aim of this section to describe Chomsky’s criticism on empiricism in linguistics thoroughly. Readers interested in this debate find detailed information not only in Chomsky’s work itself, but also in several critical reviews, e.g., Haegeman (1991); Horrocks (1987); Matthews (1981). Nevertheless, it is important to mention that, one of Chomsky’s major ar- guments against the use of empirical data in linguistics, i.e., real texts, is that the main goal of linguists should be to explain linguistic competence (i.e., internalized language knowledge) and not to describe and enumerate performance (i.e., externalized utterances) phenomena (McEnery & Wilson 2001: 12). Besides, Chomsky argues that a collection of real texts will never represent the wholeness of language:

Any natural corpus will be skewed. Some sentences won’t occur

because they are obvious, others because they are false, still others because they are impolite. The corpus, if natural, will be so widely skewed that the description [based upon it] would be no more than

a mere list. (Chomsky 1962: 159)

The impact of Chomsky’s criticism on empirical linguistics lead to the rise of rationalist context-free approaches especially in North America, no- tably, universal grammar (Chomsky 1965), generative grammar (Chomsky 1965, 1988), transformational grammar (Jackendoff 1974), government and binding (Chomsky 1981), and more recently, minimalist program (Chom- sky 1995). Although rationalism dominated the research landscape in lin- guistics in the 1950s and 1960s, empiricism was never completely aban- doned, particularly by Firth (1957, 1968), a leading British linguist, and his followers, e.g., Halliday (1959), and more recently Hoey (2005); Sin- clair (1991, 1996, 2003), for whom the central concept in linguistic analysis is the context of situation. Under the influence of these so-called Neo- Firthians, methodological approaches in dealing with naturally occurring language were developed. Within this context, the debate on Chomsky’s criticism on empiricism contributed remarkably to the further development of the most acknowledged methodology for empirical research in linguistics, corpus linguistics, which is introduced and discussed in the next section, Section 3.2.