A Comparative Analysis of Scientific Vulgarization Blogs in Portuguese

The Scientific Discoveries in Perspective

Abstract

Based on the Bakhtin’s Circle theory, we propose a comparative analysis of two blogs specialized in scientific discoveries, namely: “De Rerum Natura” and “Cientistas descobriram que ...”. Although they are written in the same official language, Portuguese, the blogs are published by researchers from two different countries, Portugal and Brazil. Consequently, we believe that blogs produce meanings according to the peculiarities of the ideological spheres of their original countries. Our main goal is to identify the meanings attributed to the notion of discovery in the posts of the two blogs, through linguistic and extralinguistic aspects. Firstly, we have be taken to the lexical entries of the linguistic sign ‘discovery’ in Portuguese and Brazilian dictionaries and we have been able to deduce two significant meanings for the context of the statements in our corpus: the discovery as a scientific finding and the result of studies; and the discovery related to the discovery of lands. This second meaning is related to the socio-historical horizon shared by the two countries around the ‘discovery’ of Brazil and other Lusophone countries. In our analysis, we could verify that the same linguistic materiality revealed different dialogical relations and temporalities in the concretization of the utterances, in the dimension of the meaning.