Scientific research articles in Malay: A situated discourse analysis.

Abstract

Research writing, as well as the choice of language in which to write it, involves highly complex and socially constructed elements of strategy and design. This situatedness is particularly manifest when research writing and publishing take place in a small, peripheral scientific discourse community still at an early stage in its development and which functions within two equally visible languages. This dissertation attempts to explore the status of Bahasa Melayu (or Malay for brevity) as an academic language and assess its prospects as a vehicle for the national dissemination of scientific and technical communication in Malaysia. In order to do so, it investigates the linguistic and rhetorical features of the genre of scientific and technical research articles published in Malay by Malaysian academics. The study is based on a corpus of 62 Malay research articles from a range of subjects in science and technology published in three institutionally-based scholarly journals in Malaysia. A macro-discoursal analysis of the introductions based on Swales (1990) is carried out, and a Malay-intrinsic model that better represents the Malay discourse is proposed as an alternative. At the micro-discoursal level, a linguistic analysis of selected grammatical features in Malay research articles (di-passive, adalah, and ia) shows an evolving pattern of syntactic change, probably influenced by English. The results of the study suggest that the variant rhetorical strategies adopted by Malay research article writers reflect the influences of local contextual factors such as the academic setting and the size of the local discourse community, rather than more general rhetorico-linguistic elements as might have been suggested by the Contrastive Rhetorical Hypotheses. Finally, the dissertation closes with proposals for the teaching of written scientific Malay and English at post-baccalaureate levels in Malaysian universities using techniques of rhetorical consciousness-raising, case study, and discourse analysis.