Functions of quoted and reported speech in scientific discourse: The results of a corpus study

Abstract

The aim of the study is to determine the functions that quoted and reported speech can perform in scientific discourse. The paper presents the results of analysing quoted and reported speech in written genres of scientific communication using the material of the Russian National Corpus. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the pragmatic functions of entering quoted and reported speech into a scientific text have been identified. As a result, it has been found that the main functions of quoted and reported speech in scientific discourse include the informative, argumentative, nominative and constructive functions. Among the described functions, the dominant position is occupied by the informative and the argumentative functions, which is due to the key tasks that a scientific work is designed to solve as a tool for communication and transmission of scientific knowledge. In addition to the main functions, the expressive one has been also highlighted, which may be characteristic of verbatim quotations that preserve the stylistic originality and distinctness of the original text. Similarities in the functioning of quoted and reported speech in scientific, popular science and news types of discourse, as well as significant differences between the functions of quoted and reported speech in scientific texts and in literary texts have been revealed.