Book review: Grichin, S. V. (2020) The evidential model of a scientific text. Novosibirsk: Novosibirsk State Technical University

Abstract

This article is a review of the book The Evidential Model of a Scientific Text by Sergey Grichin. The monograph describes evidentiality, one of the leading discursive categories of a scientific text. Grichin answers the questions: How does new knowledge emerge? How is it converted into a text? How does the dialogue between the author and his predecessors come about? Answering these questions, Grichin substantiates the status of evidentiality as a universal text-forming category. This category reflects all cognitive actions of the author of the text, so the study of evidentiality requires a complex, interdisciplinary approach. In the reviewed book, this approach is represented by the synthesis of functional stylistics, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, psychology and logic. The author of the monograph fully and clearly formulates the research methodology and defines the key concepts: evidential sense, evidential unit, evidential indicators, etc. Grichin establishes the extra-linguistic factors influencing the representation of evidential meanings in a scientific text, and describes the linguistic units for expressing these meanings. The correlation between the category of evidentiality and the category of certainty / uncertainty is shown. Regularities in the perception of evidential information by the addressee are defined. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the category of evidentiality is presented as an integrative, multifactor model, which takes into account extralinguistic (discursive) and linguistic factors of communicative and cognitive activity of the author of the text. The scientific significance of the developed model is ensured by the fact that Grichin interprets evidentiality in a wider and deeper way than it was accepted in traditional linguistics (traditionally evidentiality is understood as referring to the source of someone else’s speech). The monograph considers evidentiality as a multifactorial category, which is a tool for structuring scientific discourse. The evidentiality model is developed by Grichin on the basis of the analysis of vast material, which includes more than 300 texts in 13 branches of science. To check the validity of the concept, journalistic and colloquial (dialectal) texts are used in addition to scientific texts. The regularities of the addressee’s perception of evidential senses are analysed by means of experimental methods. The reviewers note the value of the monograph for speech studies, in particular: development of a cognitive and discursive method of scientific text analysis; identification of new extralinguistic factors of scientific communication; establishment of mechanisms of generation and perception of scientific texts.