Popularizing the Higgs Boson: a corpus-assisted approach to reporting scientific discovery in online media

This study explores the scientific popularisation process and how science knowledge is recontextualised and rewritten in the transfer from one context or genre to another genre. It does this through a case study of the discovery of the Higgs boson, a new physics particle that is commonly known as the God Particle, and by focussing on the meta-discursive strategies that emerged from the texts after corpus-assisted analysis. Extensive use was made of exemplification and generalisation through analogies andmetaphors, and through ideational content representing epistemic uncertainty in the newspaper discourse. Prominence is given to science popularisation in the British press, because online newspapers capture a wide non-expert public, the aim being to offer an analysis of how the discursive perspective of complex science news (particle physics) is conveyed to the general public, and can allow a systematic investigation into ‘how’ a scientific event is constructed and made newsworthy. Two corpora, consisting of texts from the scientific journal, Physics Letters B, and from online media blogs, were also compiled for contrastive purposes. In this way, prominent lexico-semantic textual properties are identified in the main corpus (containing newspapers) through standard corpus linguistic techniques, in particular through key semantic domain annotation, leading to more insight into how complex science is linguistically constructed and conveyed to a lay audience.