Abstract
The ability to construe and to interpret cause–effect relations is critical to the task of knowledge building in science. It is essential to understanding investigative processes and to interpreting claims. However, in the discourses of science the linguistic construal of cause and effect can be far removed from that of its everyday, commonsense expression. Studies in systemic functional linguistics have found that scientific causality is often realized inside a clause rather than between clauses (Halliday, M. A. K. 1998. Things and relations. In J. R. Martin and R. Veel [eds.], Reading science: Critical and functional perspectives on discourses of science, 185–235. London & New York: Routledge). This paper aims to further understand the challenge of making meanings of scientific causality from a linguistic perspective. I analyze the language of biology in five research articles, which are students’ key reading texts in a core undergraduate biology course at a leading Australian university. I argue that a discourse semantic understanding of “cause inside the clause” is critical for revealing the diverse language resources for constructing scientific causality.
About the author
Jing Hao is currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She holds a doctoral degree in linguistics from the University of Sydney. Her research areas include knowledge building across different disciplinary areas, in different languages (e.g. English and Mandarin Chinese), through different semiotic modes (e.g. verbiage, image and body language), and the application of these understandings to support teaching and learning. She has a forthcoming book titled Analysing Scientific Discourse from a Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective (Routledge).
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