ssity of answer, and later he prompts the answer himself or herself preparing the situation when the reader perceives this answer as his own what psychologically contributes to the optimal learning of the fact under discussion. appeal to the interlocutor is typical for the colloquial speech reflecting in the popular scientific prose in the usage of hortatory sentences: .g. Have a good look at these numbers!.g. Don t be disheartened if you notice that 10 is a power of 10, while V 10 which is exactly the same thing, is a root of 10. a large heavy ball rolling slowly across a level floor. [Bakst, 1997: 459] .g. This we call a galactic year or better, a galyear. (An ugly word, but nevermind!) .g. The true value of/тс/can only be expressed as an infinite series. Alas! But shed no tears! Once л was proved irrational, mathematicians were satisfied. [Bakst, 1997: 842] illustrates a maximum orientation on the reader in order to create the atmosphere of credence between the author and the reader.fixed regard to the reader is expressed in the usage of pronouns you and your instead of one establishing close contact between the author and the reader: .g. You can play a large number of games ..g. Have you ever walked along a railroad track? If you have, you must have noticed that the rails seem to meet far away in a point..g. For three you could not point to eyes or ears or feet ... but you could use three fingers or three pebbles or three sticks. [Carroll, 1968: 60] .g. Can anyone possibly be sorry that all that cute provincial flavor has vanished? Are you sorry that every time you travel out of the state you don t have to throw yourself into fits of arithmetical discomfort whenever you want to make a purchase? [Carroll, 1968: 70] and colloquial lexicon also contribute to an intimization of narration diminishing the barrier of officiality between the author and the reader: .g. By this point, however, it is just possible that some of you may suspect me of pulling a fast one ..g. Why it should be called the average value heaven only knows. .g. Now why on Earth should our unit ratios vary all over the lot , when our number system is so firmly based on 10 ». g. The lie detector immediately recorded that he was telling a whopping. [Dodgeson, 1972: 167] .g. This assertion seems at first to be downright nonsense ..g. The boat kept swaying, pitching, yawing, heaving, rolling and otherwise making a jackass of itself all night long! jackass (not fml): a fool.g. There is no way of estimating and the continuous - creation boys consider its lifetime to be eternal..g. When any symbol (which includes figures, letters or any other squiqgle we may be using) is multiplied by itself it is said to be squared.
(National Geographic, 2005) .g. Newton also showed this central-point business to be true for spheres which consisted of a series of layers ... .g. Then along came the Greeks and developed a system of geometry that would have none of this vile lav-down-a-string-and-measure-it-with-a-ruler business. .g. What is all this? Laquo; comes the fevered demand. Where does this divide by 10 jazz come from? (Scientific American, 2004) to such representation the reader gets the information in the accessible form. of the narration expressiveness is one more stylistic method of popular scientific representation.
As we have already mentioned, the authors of popular scientific literature employ a number of stylistic devices and means such as epithets, metaphors, simile to make texts more interesting and vivid. In the extract below taken from Words in the Mind, its author, Jean Aitchison, gives some explanations on the concept of mental maps in linguistics comparing to some other concepts, a map of the London Underground in particular:
Model of the mind built by psycholinguists are somewhere in between the concrete models of spacecraft and the abstract models of economists. Perhaps the best analogy is that of a map, which in some fits a real life state of affairs and in other ways is quite different. It is obvious that the most useful map is often not an exact representation of the terrain. The well-known map of the London Underground ... provides an elegant way od summarizing essential information ... It sacrifices realism but given its purpose is a better map for doing so ... The map tells us clearly which train-lines connect with stations ... We ...
