INTERTEXTUALITY AS A COGNITIVE ASPECT OF ENGLISH SCIENTIFIC-TECHNICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of intertextuality as one of the cognitive aspects of scientific and technical discourse, the study and analysis of which is a relevant topic for linguists in relation to the development of science, technology and the digitalization of society. The presence of intertextual relations is a distinctive feature of scientific and technical texts. A prototypical unit of intertextual communication in a scientific and technical text has been established; it is formed as a triad “a quote in quotation marks + name and title reference + bibliographic reference”. Citation is one of the means of realization of intertextual relations in scientific and technical discourse. Scientific citation is considered as an explicit inclusion; it is a marker of dialogism and a means of fragments integrating from primary source into another text. The discourse analysis of English-language scientific and technical texts (scientific articles and engineering monographs) has been conducted. As a result, three types of direct citations were identified and established. This classification is based on the criteria of the form and volume of citations: the full ones, the reduced ones, and the segmented ones. Other types of explicit inclusions (indirect speech and author’s narrative) are analysed; they are characterized by the presence of parenthetical structures, lexical, syntactic and lexical-syntactic markers, verbs and prepositional-verbal phrases. References are considered as an implicit type of citation. It was established that in the case of using reference, the functions of intertextual relations are performed not by fragments of the primary text, but by paratext elements that point to the original source. The influence of precedent phenomena on the organization of the text in the scientific and technical discourse is noted. Using the example of eponyms, it is proved that precedent phenomena are verbalized in the form of certain words, collocations or terms. This type of intertextuality does not have special textual demarcations; eponyms appeal to the existing apperceptive level of the author and reader of the scientific and technical text. All provisions of the article are illustrated by a large amount of authentic English language material.