Building taxonomies. A discourse semantic model of entities and dimensions in biology
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Date
2021
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Routledge
Abstract
Science involves nuanced and highly technical distinctions among empirical phenomena. This chapter explores how these deep and multifaceted taxonomies are developed through language in undergraduate biology by examining both pedagogic texts and students written assessments. The chapter presents a major development in modelling ideational meanings within SFL’s discourse semantics. It first builds a system of ‘entity types’ and ‘dimensionality’ from a ‘trinocular’ perspective. It then illustrates how the framework of entities and dimensions can be applied to text analysis by revealing both the diversity and depth of taxonomies demonstrated in a student research report produced at the final year of undergraduate biology. This analysis shows the appliability of the discourse semantic method for examining scientific taxonomies and makes explicit the multitude of ways in which various field-specific resources (presented in Martin and Doran this volume) are realized in language.