How passive voice gets affected by popularization. A quantitative analysis of scientific research articles and university press releases

Abstract

 The passive voice has been explored for its communicative potential offered by the possibility to omit the agent, which makes it suitable for both ideological and academic discourse. Research has shown that the passive voice is a characterizing element of academic discourse, but there is a gap in the research concerning the incidence of the passive voice in popularized science discourse. In this paper, the presence and form of the passive voice are analyzed and compared in two bijective English corpora: one comprising published research papers (n = 30) and the other their respective popularized versions published as press releases on university websites (n = 30). The results of the quantitative analysis show statistically significant differences with regard to the amount of passive voice constructions between the two corpora; the difference in the use of the be-passives is also significant; the differences of get-passives, conjoined passives, and bare passives are not statistically significant between the two corpora. Additionally, some novel tendencies seem to arise: the scientific texts present instances of get-passives, which might point toward a contamination between academic language and the objects of analysis, such as text corpora, interview transcripts, or other verbal materials analyzed in the articles.