העברית כשפת מחקר מודרנית

It is not self-evident that every language is a suitable medium for scientific writing. In order for a language to serve scientific communication in the modern sense, it must include certain specific linguistic structures that characterize the scientific discourse of our days. Lexemes and phrases can be easily borrowed from other languages, but more crucial are syntactic structures, among them: (1) Abstraction, especially through nominalization – The wide distribution ׳ pay-offs ׳ of nominalization in scientific discourse has various causes and (Halliday, 2004). Nominalizations serve to create technical meaning, since nominal phrases are the most powerful resource for creating taxonomies ׳ things ׳ (categories and subcategories). They create a semiotic universe of that can be observed, measured, and tested. Moreover, nominalization serves the coherent discursive movement from theme (the known part) to rheme (the new knowledge), which is characteristic of scientific discourse as a chain of reasoning. (2) Impersonality – Impersonal structures are required in order to create Livnat, 2006), an accepted convention of scientific ) ״ a rhetoric of objectivity ״ writing. Languages differ in the ways they downgrade agency and express an impersonal stance. Hebrew makes much less use of the passive voice than English (Jisa et al., 2002). Hebrew scientific language, on the other hand, makes intensive use of subjectless modal operators. (3) Epistemic modality, i.e., various ways of expressing doubt, reservation, or certainty. ׳ facticity ׳ These elements are required in order to design different degrees of in scientific discourse.