“Logically, We Quite Agree with the IARC”: Negotiating Interpersonal Meaning in a Corpus of Scientific Texts

This chapter extends the scope of a previous study (Fusari 2017 and in press 2018) of the reception, by a range of scientific journals featured in the database Elsevier Science Direct, of a 2015 report (IARC 2015) in which the International Agency for Research on Cancer officially incorporated red meat in Group 2A carcinogens (probably carcinogenic to humans) and processed meat in Group 1 (carcinogenic to humans). For this study, we have built a 384,491 words corpus, fully POS-tagged, and partially parsed using a systemic functional grammatical formalism. While the previous stages in this project concentrated on ideational meaning, addressing the use of mass vs. countable nouns, nominalization, the experiential structure of the Noun Group, and patterns of Transitivity, this new step moves beyond representation (Glenn 2004; Gupta 2006; Stibbe 2014; Cook 2015), to explore interpersonal meaning. This area of meaning is less widely studied with corpus approaches, largely because of the greater difficulty, both technical and epistemological, of analysing Tenor with a corpus-assisted approach (Fuoli 2018). Our aim is to analyze how the roles of the various Participants (IARC, scientific community, general public) in the discursive construction of meat carcinogenicity are negotiated. To achieve this aim, we rely on the notions of Attitude, Engagement and stance, in terms of both Appraisal theory (Martin & White 2005) and interactional metadiscourse (Hyland 2005; 2017; Jiang & Hyland 2017). We concentrate specifically on attitudinal Values, Graduation, comment Adjuncts, modal verbs and personal pronouns. The results show that the scientific literature exemplified in this corpus does not aim to settle the meat/cancer controversy once and for all, but rather to “persuade readers [i.e. other members of the relevant discourse communities] of the scientific acceptability of the knowledge claims presented” (Allen, Qin & Lancaster 1994, p. 280). Therefore, the discursive construction of meat carcinogenicity should not be seen only in terms of relating objective facts and hard data about the levels of risk involved, but also in terms of “dialogism” (O’Hallaron, Palincsar & Schleppegrell 2015), which is equally - if not more - important to reach a shared interpretation (Fernández Polo 2018) of scientific facts.