Was there life on Mars?: Politeness strategies in a research article from a heated scientific debate

Abstract

This paper analyzes a scientific research article (RA) in the field of planetary science using the perspective of genre analysis. A subject specialist informant was interviewed to provide insight into writer choice and language use in the genre. This study worked largely within Myers' (1989) framework in which a variety of language phenomena in RAs are explained by application ofthe Brown and Levinson model of politeness. The purpose of the study was to better understand the ways in which writers use various politeness devices (such as expression of emotion and the hedging of claims), and the choices writers make to employ or not employ such politeness devices. The results of the study show infrequent use of positive politeness strategies, but heavy use of negative politeness strategies, primarily hedging. Hedging was used almost exclusively in the Introduction and Discussion sections of the article, and the amount of hedging seems to be linked not to the relative strength or weakness of the claims, but rather the amount of face-threat those claims presented, the communicative purposes of different sections of the article, and the authors' choice about the degree to which they want to sound firm or even aggressive. Finally, hedging in this case was used not only as a politeness strategy to save face for the readers, but also as a defensive move to shield the authors' position from attack and save their own face in the event of counter-arguments.