Written fluency -- Autumn semester 2004 Handout 7 - Tuesday, 30 November 2004 Scientific prose style. Humanities vs. exact sciences. Popular science texts. Task 1: Try to translate the following Czech phrases into the English scientific/academic style: Dá se říci, že ... Můžeme uvést tři příklady: ... Musíme si uvědomit, že ... Myslíme si, že ... Musíme mít na paměti velmi důležitý aspekt .... Zjistili jsme případy, ve kterých ... Když porovnáme ... ... , zjistíme, že .... ...vztah, který vyjadřujeme takto: ... Nepochopili bychom ... ..., kdybychom nestudovali ... ... Jde nám o ... ... Abychom snížili nepřesnost ... Budeme muset definovat podmínky ... Stanovením ... se zabýváme v kapitole VI Task 2: Find and replace the inappropriate expressions and structures with words an phrases more acceptable in technical/academic texts. This is pretty important, but Chomsky doesn´t mention it. We must get rid of the mistakes. This device has got a lot of good features. There are various methods ... I think that/According to me, Czech industry .... Therefore, we can conclude ... It got good reviews. Investors must be encouraged by certain privileges, like tax concessions, cheap land.... ...schools, hospitals, museums and so on. Task 3: Complete the table with relevant linguistic means used to achieve the desirable properties or perform the given functions of scientific style. Functions or Corresponding linguistic means (grammatical, features lexical, ....) classifying hypothesizing drawing conclusions defining describing states describing processes describing cause and effect impersonality Task 4: Rewrite the following scientific prose style text as a popular didactic text, suitable for non-specialist readers. 2.9 Idioms and collocations The term collocation will be used to refer to sequences of lexical items which habitually co-occur, but which are nonetheless fully transparent in the sense that each lexical constituent is also a semantic constituent. Such expressions as (to pick a semantic area at random) fine weather, torrential rain, light drizzle, high winds are examples of collocations. These are of course easy to distinguish from idioms; nonetheless, they do have a kind of semantic cohesion - the constituent elements are, to varying degrees, mutually selective. The semantic integrity or cohesion of a collocation is the more marked if the meaning carried by one (or more) of its constituent elements is highly restricted contextually, and different from its meaning in more neutral contexts. Consider the case of heavy in heavy drinker. This sense of heavy requires fairly narrowly defined contextual conditions: one may speak of a heavy smoker, or a heavy drug-user, a car may be heavy on petrol, etc. For this sense of heavy to be selected, the notion of "consumption" in the immediate environment seems to be a prerequisite. In a neutral context like It´s ----, heavy has a different meaning. We are still, however, in the realms of transparent sentences, because each constituent produces a recurrent semantic contrast: 31. heavy (He´s a ---- smoker) = heavy (They were ---- drinkers) light light 32. drinker (He´s a heavy ----) = drinker (They´re light -- --s) smoker smoker Semantic cohesiveness is even tighter if the meaning of one of the elements of a collocation requires a particular lexical item in its immediate context (cases where all the elements are uniquely selective in this way seem not to occur). Such is the case with, for example, foot the bill and curry favour.