Punctuation of Scientific Prose as a Cross-Cultural Phenomenon. Tatiana Evtushenko National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University, Tomsk, Russia

Transcription

1 Punctuation of Scientific Prose as a Cross-Cultural Phenomenon Tatiana Evtushenko National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University, Tomsk, Russia 0216 The European Conference on Language Learning 2013 Official Conference Proceedings 2013 Contemporary Issues on Language Learning Abstract This paper presents the study of current tendencies of the punctuation usage in modern Russian and English (mostly American) scientific prose which suffers the influence of fast development of Information Technologies, language contact, and general instability of modern punctuation practice. The combination of common punctuation marks, consistent with other typographic devices provides a specific complex multi-level structure of a modern computer edited scientific text. The use of all punctuation devices is reduced to separating, emphasizing and linking functions and is governed by the set of rules and standards specific for different languages. The obligatory compliance of punctuation rules in Russian is contrasted to the recommending nature of English punctuation; the main objective of the latter is to reveal the communicative intention of a speaker and to make the text interpretation easier for a recipient. Contrasting the punctuation of Russian and English scientific constructions allows to reveal a number of similarities such as the same set and similar functions of punctuation devices and lack of stable uniformity at different publishing houses. The punctuation differences in Russian and English texts are reduced to its real functioning. The use of punctuation in Russian pre-printed texts is not strictly limited by the established Russian rules and shows more correspondence with English punctuation functioning. Such correspondence suggests that punctuation conventions are not completely governed by a certain language but are rather intercultural. This thesis contributes to the scientific study of modern punctuation status as an international phenomenon that exists independently for inter-language general usage. iafor The International Academic Forum

2 Punctuation of Scientific Prose as a Cross-Cultural Phenomenon Tatiana Evtushenko National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University, Tomsk, Russia tanyayevtushenko@yahoo.com Introduction This scientific research focuses on current tendencies of punctuation usage in modern Russian and English scientific prose (mostly American and International). The punctuation rules for both languages are widely presented nowadays in punctuation guides and manuals (Valguina 2004, Rubens 2001, Kirkman 2006, etc.). The theoretical issues of modern punctuation practice and the compliance of these rules are also considered in well-known manuscripts (see, for example, Shubina 2006; Truss 2004, etc.), where the researchers describe the state of the art and analyze the nature of changes in modern punctuation systems using descriptive and comparative methods (Orehova 2000). However, using the conventional contrastive approach allows to describe only the main differences and similarities of the punctuation of Russian and English languages and to study the main punctuation principles, rules and conventions. Our approach of studying the standard printed language and the tendencies in pre-printed texts at the same time helps determine the features and also the perspectives of the punctuation of scientific prose in future. According to published results, not enough attention has been paid to the relationship between punctuating and the researcher s mind who writes a scientific paper. Since these two are closely related, additional psycholinguistic investigations in this area are necessary. Studying the naïve punctuation of natural writing (Lebedeva 2002), which is not edited by publishers, helps us reveal the nature and the attitude to this phenomenon in different languages and see how people with different mentalities use punctuation devices. Since nowadays English became an international language in many scientific areas and correspondingly it demonstrates the mixing of ideas and mentalities it is of interest to find out in what way the international English may affect people s thinking. In this paper, Russian and English printed and pre-printed scientific papers in the areas of electronics and computer science were considered. The scientific prose was analyzed using the descriptive and contrastive methods which enabled us to enlighten basic principles, similarities and differences of Russian and English punctuation. The main findings of this work concern the analysis of the naïve punctuation of preprinted texts where Russian punctuation rules are not strictly complied and some cases of the deviance correspond to English standards. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In the motivation section, the background and scientific aspects of this investigation are discussed. In the main body of the paper, the punctuation principles, common and specific features of punctuating Russian and English scientific prose are considered. The punctuation deviance in Russian pre-printed texts and its correspondence to English standards is described. In

3 the conclusion the implications of the research with venues for future work are suggested. Motivation The set of punctuation devices and the range of their functions, i.e. both quality and quantity of punctuation marks, are constantly changing due to the development of new digital forms of communication (internet, mobile phones, etc.). Thus, many people, no matter well-educated or not, become writers nowadays (Truss 2004), which has a certain affect on functioning of punctuation in different areas, in particular Russian and English scientific writing. Russian young scientists not having time to study punctuation rules in the EFL classroom acquire them based on their own experience, i.e. from reading scientific papers in English language produced by researchers of different nationalities which are not necessarily edited by high quality publishing houses. Thus, the punctuation of Russian and English electronic and printed texts, in particular scientific texts, reveals general inconsistency of modern punctuation practice which is governed by the following factors: 1) more freedom in Russian mentality that affects different aspects of writing, 2) fast development of Information Technologies, and 3) language contact, since ordinary young people start communicating in English, and this language in some cases is very far from the classical British language. Last 20 years most scientific journals in the area of computer science and electronics are not translated anymore into native languages, and young researchers do not have other choice than to read them in English. It can thereby be one of the reasons of punctuation changes in Russian scientific prose. English language is considered in this paper as a language of 1) the Internet in some areas of research (electronics and computer science), 2) the universal English symbols and typographic signals on the computer key-board, and 3) the official language of scientific conferences and publications in many international journals. Therefore, since English has a major effect on different aspects of Russian scientific language, the objective of this study is to analyze how international English interferes with Russian concept of punctuating scientific prose. Methods and corpora The corpora used for the analysis are printed and pre-printed Russian and English scientific papers. The printed texts from known publishing houses are treated as standard, whereas the pre-printed texts produced by Russian young scientists are not corrected by editors. Studying these texts allows to find the cases of deviance from Russian punctuation rules. These texts illustrate the naive idea of punctuating scientific prose in the minds of Russian researchers. The data were collected using a descriptive method with the elements of contrastive analysis; they are used to find the correspondence between theory and practice in the punctuation of scientific writing. In our research it is important not to treat this deviance just as non-accuracy. These cases are considered from the anthropological point of view to reveal a natural and common way of expressing a scientific idea in different languages, in particular, the convenience and logics of using them by a young Russian researcher. Combining all the mentioned techniques enable us to study

4 English itself and how it influences other languages not only in the aspects of the past and the present, but also the future. We studied printed scientific papers from well-known publishers such as Elsevier, IEEE, Springer, etc. Russian scientific papers were analyzed from good blind reviewed journals edited by correctors: Izvestiya of Russian Academy of Sciences, Vestnik of Tomsk State University, Izvestiya of Tomsk Polytechnic University, etc. Russian pre-printed scientific papers were written by young Russian researchers who have to read and write in English language. The common and specific features of punctuating Russian and English scientific prose As far as an electronic or printed scientific text (Russian or English) is concerned, the combination of conventional punctuation marks, consistent with other typographic signals and effects provides its complex multi-level structure. Variation of these devices contributes to the efficiency of the scientific text interpretation. The use of micro-level punctuation, i.e. conventional punctuation marks such as a comma, full stop, colon and others, is governed by the set of rules and standards specific for different languages. The nature of conventional stops in scientific writing is not only grammatical or semantic as is described in various guides; apart from that their specific formal functions are specified in templates. The use of macro-level punctuation, i.e. the typographic devices such as capitalization, spacing, variation of font, size-type, etc., emphasizing the hierarchy of the text elements (headings, abstracts, terms), is specified by a great variety of standards offered by different publishing houses and is not formally codified in Russian and English languages. However, the requirements given in the templates must be strictly followed comparing to rather optional usage of conventional punctuation marks in the international scientific prose. There are more similarities in modern punctuation of Russian and English scientific prose that are not evident from the first sight: 1) almost the same set and similar functions of punctuation devices, 2) the inconsistency of the elective use of symbols and characters (e.g. British and American quotes; em- and en-dashes, etc.) and the typographic organization within one language but different publishing houses. Despite of the fact that the graphic structure of a scientific text in European languages is mostly common, there are differences in the main punctuation principles, in particular, in Russian and English punctuation systems. In this paper, the prescriptive approach of punctuating Russian prose is contrasted to the anthropological approach of English punctuation. The compliance of the rules in Russian is obligatory, whereas the nature of English punctuation is recommending and its main objective is to reveal the communicative intention of the author and to make the text interpretation easier for the recipient. To be more precise, in most cases, similar syntactic constructions in English scientific prose can be punctuated in different ways depending on the length and meaning of the sentence. Because of this, English punctuation standards are presented in the guides not only as strict rules, but mostly as conventions. However, the theory and practice of Russian punctuation, which was known to be very strict some decades

5 ago, is suffering slow changes nowadays, and the amends are introduced for some rules in accordance with the meaning of the sentence and the author s intention. Because of the recommending nature of English punctuation usage, three types of equivalence of punctuating syntactic constructions in Russian and English can be specified. The equivalence types together with some examples are given in Table 1. Table 1. Types of equivalence of punctuating syntactic constructions in Russian and English English style Russian style, which + /non-restrictive, which + /non-restrictive clause/, clause/, The power loss can be reduced by The power loss can be reduced by switching the transmitter direct to switching the transmitter direct to the X the X aerial, which is mounted on aerial, which is mounted on the roof,... the roof,... Full equivalence Partial equivalence Full nonequivalence /Introductory phrase/, /simple or complex sentence/ In this paper we consider the following examples. In this paper, we consider the following examples. /Principal clause/ that /subordinate clause/ It follows that /Introductory phrase/ /simple or complex sentence/ In this paper we consider the following examples. /Principal clause/, that /subordinate clause/ It follows, that The deviance from Russian rules in pre-printed scientific texts: drifting to English standards The punctuation of pre-printed scientific texts shows how texts are punctuated from the point of view of young Russian researchers. It appears that this punctuation is not limited by the standards presented in the rules and typographic guides. There are two types of the deviance: 1) not all the symbols used in the pre-printed texts exist in Russian standard punctuation practice, 2) the punctuation devices are used in the functions not prescribed by the rules. 1) The punctuation of pre-printed texts produced by Russian researchers is characterized by a wider set of punctuation devices, since the additional symbols that are alien for Russian punctuation standards such as a long dash ( ) or English quotes ( ) and etc. are frequently used in pre-printed electronic variant. The example below illustrates the use of a long dash instead of the Russian en-dash: e.g.... this can be done by omitting the additive though this should be done only as a last resort. 2) Pre-printed texts also demonstrate a wider range of functions for micro- and macrolevel punctuation. Conventional punctuation marks that separate units (period, comma, dash, etc.) and the typographic devices such as capitalization, italics and underlining possess a wider functional potential in pre-printed texts. Some are used for giving additional emphasis to the words and phrases that seem to be important to the author but not essential enough to the syntactic structure. The example below shows omitting of a comma between the clauses of a compound sentence:

6 e.g. The samples have arrived_and testing will begin shortly. According to the collected data, the deviance from Russian standards appears to correspond to a number of English scientific style punctuation rules. The symbols that are used in pre-printed texts do not exist in Russian scientific prose but they are taken from the universal international system of writing. We found many cases when the punctuation devices in Russian pre-printed texts are used in functions that are not specified by Russian punctuation rules and correspond to English punctuation rules. These are the cases of usage of a full stop, comma, dash and capitalization in delineation and serialization functions. The examples of this drifting tendency are shown below. The following example represents the use of the English quotes instead of Russian (): e.g. the plasma tube temperature increases automatically A comma used after an introductory phrase or initial group is a common case. In Russian language this case is not specified by the rules and is considered as an error in the corrected printed version: e.g. In Section I, the basic expression to be used in the theoretical development is obtained. The comparative analysis allowed to assume that Russian punctuation seems to be slowly drifting to English standards. However, it still needs further research whether we deal here with the interference or a cross-cultural phenomenon of punctuation in scientific writing. Conclusions and discussion The obtained results show that the range of punctuation devices and their functions of pre-printed texts is wider than in the printed texts and modern punctuation practice of Russian scientific prose corresponds to English standards in some cases. The inconsistency of Russian punctuation practice, contact of languages in science, and the anthropological approach, which is slowly being accepted in Russian punctuation practice, create favorable conditions for modifying Russian mentality and the concept of punctuating Russian and English scientific prose, and thereby this research contributes to the scientific study of modern punctuation status as a cross-cultural phenomenon. This research has a number of applications. The results can be used as tips for teaching punctuation in the EFL classroom: teaching Russian punctuation at school, or teaching English punctuation to young researchers, as well as these results can be useful in machine translation. This study also contributes to solving some important linguistic problems when determining the status of modern punctuation and contributing to normalizing processes. It is theoretically important to continue the research of current punctuation tendencies in different areas of scientific style using the collected data in order to study the relationship between micro- and macro-text level punctuation in the minds of researchers of different mentality, to investigate how punctuation of European and Eastern languages affects the punctuation of international English, to develop new experimental methods for studying the interference phenomena in punctuating scientific writing.

7 References Valguina N. (2004) The problems of modern Russian punctuation, trans., Moscow: Visshaya shkola. Lebedeva N. (2002) Natural punctuation: stating a problem // The language situation in Russia at the beginning of the 21 st century (pp ), vol.2. trans., Kemerovo: Kemerovo State University. Orehova N. (2000) Punctuation and writing, trans., Ijevsk: Udmurtsky University. Shubina N. (2006) Punctuation of modern Russian language, trans., Moscow: Akademiya. Truss L. (2004) Eats. Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, New York: Penguin Group. Kirkman J. (2006) Punctuation Matters Advice on Punctuation for Scientific and Technical Writing, London and New York: Routledge. Rubens Ph. (2001) Science and Technical Writing: A Manual of Style, New York: Routledge.

8 Susan Grider Montgomery, HEALTH COMES FIRST!!!, USA