Bemerkung und Revision. Zur Steuerungsfunktion naturwissenschaftlicher Textsorten am Beispiel von Experimentalbericht und litterärhistorischer Erzählung um 1800 (2014) (original) (raw)

2014, In: Sprachen der Wissenschaften 1600-1850. Scientific Languages 1600-1850. Bd. 2: Sprachliche Differenzierung und wissenschaftliche Nationalisierung (= Jahrbuch für Europäische Wissenschaftskultur, Bd. 7). Hrsg. v. Daniel Ulbrich. Stuttgart: Steiner 2014. S. 159-257.

The article focuses on the contribution of linguistic mechanisms and devices to the direction and management of research processes in chemistry around 1800. Taking texts of 18th century chemists A. N. Scherer and J. F. A. Göttling as its examples, it will examine in parallel the ways and workings of two different types of such devices: (1) the narrative of historia literaria or History of Learning (‘Revision’ or ‘review’) and (2) the genre of experimental essay (‘Bemerkung’ or ‘remark’). It will be argued that, from the point of view of speech act theory, both do not only serve constative purposes, but also exert performative tasks. Review and remark do, however, differ with respect to the dominating types of illocutionary force, their prototypical propositional content and the specific locutionary forms employed in pursuing their respective illocutionary point. Thus, in reviews recognition of illocutionary forces interpretable as counsel and guidance for future research will often afford cumbersome inferences from narrative structures, yielding directive speech acts whose propositional content will primarily consist in the description of general norms of scientific conduct and whose illocutionary forces will be at best of a recommendatory nature. In comparison, ties between locutionary form and illocutionary point in remarks are considerably stronger and provide for an illocutionary regime of questions and requests which take concrete laboratory operations and chemical reactions brought about by them as their propositional content.

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