The Choice Between Generic Scientific Terms in Linguistic Research Articles Written in Finnish

While researchers use a lot of space in their articles for defining terms, generic scientific terms are often used without definition. The terms ‘theory’, ‘hypothesis’, ‘method’, and ‘model’, for example, are assumed to be self-explanatory and their meaning is only rarely defined in research articles. The use of these terms in scientific discourse, however, is not without ambiguity. I investigated the different factors that may affect choices among generic scientific terms in the field of linguistics, applying a mixed-methods approach. In the first stage, a study was conducted based on 23 responses by Finnish linguists to a questionnaire concerning differences between these terms (Luodonpää-Manni 2013). The second stage, presented here, consisted of applying the results of the previous study to an authentic research article corpus, consisting of sixty linguistic articles written in Finnish. The type of sequential strategy adopted allows us to uncover the factors affecting choices among generic scientific terms according to hermeneutic principles, in relation to concepts considered meaningful by researchers themselves. The findings suggest that the choice between generic scientific terms is influenced by a number of conceptual and stylistic factors, ranging from different epistemic traditions to stylistic creativity.