universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

244less experienced professionals’. By using references, they may signal that they do notconsider the reader to share the same background knowledge due to the numeroustendencies within the field. Heterogeneity in linguistics may be associated with lack ofmaturity (at least for the positivist view of science), resulting from having attained thestatus of an “established science” much later than other sciences ix . Chemists, on the otherhand, seem to be too secure of the grounds over which their discipline stands and,therefore, take a lot for granted as common knowledge in the form of a paradigm sharedwith their readership (since the scientific revolution of the eighteenth century ix ).Economics combines characteristics of the other two areas: at the same time that it isnot an “exact” science such as chemistry because of its political component, it seeks toattain the status of rigorous “scientific” discipline.A final observation concerning the greater importance given to Sub-function 4 inlinguistics relates to what might be regarded as the “didactic role” of BRs in linguistics.According to Nwogu (1990:176), in rewritten versions of research articles for a lessprofessional audience, writers tend ‘to provide readers with basic instructions onprinciples and concepts underlying the research problems or the research results’ in theform of the rhetorical sub-function “Explaining principles and concepts”, which isanalogous to what in BRs is called “Making topic generalizations”. A greater tendencyto adopt a didactic perspective on linguistics BRs may result from the specific appliedcharacter of the discipline in opposition to chemistry and economics.This tendency can also mean that reviewers differ in the way they conceive theirreadership and, ultimately, their field (as the interviews in Chapter 3 suggest). Linguistics