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Contents
Methods
To understand how presupposition and assertion use has changed over time, this paper examines 30 scientific research articles from the 1970s to 2021, sampling at 2-year intervals across 10-year sections (i.e., 1970-1972, 1980-1982… ). Originally, the focus of the search was on the ecological and environmental sciences related to anthropological contexts, but was expanded to the generalized biological sciences in order to build a sufficient corpus. Some main subgenres explored in these sciences include: ecology and environmental sciences, such as population dynamics, environmental justice, and sustainability, and medical sciences, such as pathology, genetics, and epidemiology. In order to further focus my corpus, I selected articles pertaining to ethnic groups, people of color, and minority groups. Notably, each decade appeared to feature different keyword choices in order to find relevant articles (see Table 1). Searching for texts before the 90’s required more drastic change in keyword selection, such as searching for “indigenous” and “native” referring to flora and fauna, rather than people.
|
Decade |
Key Words |
|
1970 |
Race, racial groups |
|
1980 |
Ethnic groups, ethnics |
|
1990 |
Ethnic, racial, minority groups, POC |
|
2000 |
Environmental justice, indigenous, native populations, POC, minorities |
|
2010 |
Environmental justice, indigenous, native populations, POC, ethnic minorities |
|
2020 |
Environmental justice, indigenous, native populations, POC, ethnic minorities |
Analysis
My analysis involved sorting through each article and identifying attitude markers in the presuppositions and assertions of the article’s summary/abstract, introduction and background, as well as the results discussion. I composed an Excel spreadsheet in order to physically count the instances of each; this also acted as an annotated resource for developing the discussion.