اسم سازی و کاهش ادراک عاملیت در گفتمان: مطالعه ای تجربی (مقاله علمی وزارت علوم)
درجه علمی: نشریه علمی (وزارت علوم)
آرشیو
چکیده
آیا نوع صورت بندی زبانی یک رویداد می تواند بر ادراک افراد از میزان مسئولیتی که متوجه عامل رویداد است تأثیر بگذارد؟ در این پژوهش تأثیر اسم سازی بر قضاوت افراد از میزان مسئولیت عامل در گفتمان بررسی شده است. برای پاسخ به پرسش پژوهش، دو تکلیف طراحی شدند. در تکلیف اول تعداد 331 آزمودنی دو سناریو با موضوع حادثه در رستوران و آلودگی محیط زیست را یک بار در قالب افعال معلوم و یک بار در قالب افعال اسم سازی شده خواندند و میزان مقصر بودن عامل و میزان خسارت واردشده را در قالب طیف لیکرت قضاوت کردند. نتایج نشان داد آزمودنی ها عامل نسخه دارای اسم سازی از سناریوی «رستوران» را به طور معنی داری کمتر مقصر شناختند. اما در سناریوی «محیط زیست» تفاوت معنی داری در مقصر دانستن عامل در حالت اسم سازی و فاقد اسم سازی مشاهده نشد. همچنین، میزان صدمه واردشده نیز در هر دو نسخه از سناریوهای «رستوران» و «محیط زیست» فاقد تفاوت معنی دار بود. به منظور اطمینان از پایایی اثر مشاهده شده در سناریوی «رستوران»، تکلیف دومی مشابه با تکلیف نخست و با موضوع حادثه در جلسه مصاحبه طراحی شد و پرسش خسارت این بار با گزینه های ریالی طرح شد. در این تکلیف 146 آزمودنی غیر از آزمودنی های تکلیف اول به پرسش ها پاسخ دادند. نتایج نشان داد، همانند سناریوی «رستوران»، آزمودنی ها به طور معنی داری میزان مقصر بودن عامل در نسخه دارای اسم سازی را کمتر ارزیابی کردند؛ اما تفاوت معنی داری در پاسخ به میزان خسارت یافت نشد. یافته های این پژوهش نقش اسم سازی در کم رنگ سازی میزان عاملیت در گفتمان را تأیید می کند.Nominalization and Lowered Perception of Agency in Discourse: An Empirical Study
Abstract Could the way an event is encoded in language affect people’s perception of the responsibility attributed to the agent of the event? This article aimed to empirically investigate the effect of nominalization on the participants’ perception of the responsibility attributed to an agent in discourse. To answer the research question, two tasks were designed. In the first task, 331 participants read two scenarios, namely “An Accident in the Restaurant” and “Environmental Pollution”, in two nominalized and non-nominalized versions. Then, they answered two questions regarding the responsibility of the agent in bringing about the accident and the amount of damage on a Likert scale. The results showed that the nominalized version of the Restaurant scenario had caused participants to rate the responsibility of the agent in the accident significantly lower than in the non-nominalized version. No effect of nominalization was found for either question in the Environment scenario, nor for the question asking about the amount of damage in the Restaurant scenario. In order to test the reliability of the observed effect, a second task was designed in which an accident happened in an interview session. One hundred forty-six new participants participated in the second task. The results of the second task showed the same patterns as in the first task. Participants had rated the responsibility of the agent in the nominalized version of the scenario significantly lower compared to their responsibility in the non-nominalized version. The findings confirm the role of nominalization in concealing agency in discourse. Keywords: Nominalization, Agency, Causation, Discourse Comprehension, Language and Thought Introduction Nominalization is a process that converts a verb or an adjective into a noun. This conversion (in the case of verbs) usually results in the removal or concealment of agency and temporal information of the event (Machin & Mayr, 2012). The removal of agency in nominalizations leads to one of its important and ideological functions in discourse: hiding responsibility in causal events. Critical linguists have long been interested in the ideological effects of nominalization in analyzing texts and discourse (e.g., Dunmire, 2011; Fairclough, 2003; Fowler, 1991). Yet, the cognitive effects of nominalization in obscuring responsibility of agents are not sufficiently explored. In this article, we empirically tested the hypothesis that nominalization lowers the perception of responsibility attributed to the agent of an event. Materials and Methods To test the research hypothesis, two tasks were designed following in part the method used by Fausey & Boroditsky (2010). In the first task, 331 participants read two scenarios, namely “An Accident in the Restaurant” and “Environmental Pollution”, one in the nominalized and the other in the non-nominalized form. In each scenario, an agent accidentally causes some damage to objects. After the participants read the scenario, they answered two questions regarding the responsibility of the agent in bringing about the accident and the amount of damage on a 9-point Likert scale. The second task was designed to test the reliability of the observed effects in the first task. In the second task, the scale points of the “amount of damage” question were converted to quantitative monetary units and also a new scenario called “Interview” was constructed. One hundred forty-six new participants participated in the second task. In the non-nominalized versions of the scenarios, 6 active verbs were used. In the nominalized versions of the scenarios, the active verbs used in the non-nominalized group were converted into nominalized verbs. All the remaining words were identical in the nominalized and non-nominalized versions. Four lists were created and participants were assigned to one of the lists. In the first list, participants saw one of the scenarios in the nominalized and the other scenario in the non-nominalized from. In the second list, they saw the same scenarios as in the first list but with the order of scenarios and questions reversed. The order of scenarios and questions were reversed to control the possible order effect. In the third list, the scenarios of the first list that were in the nominalized form were changed to non-nominalized form and vice versa. The fourth list reversed the order of scenarios and questions of the third list. Participants were told to read the scenarios and mark any point on the scale they find appropriate. They were told there were no correct and incorrect answers. The task took approximately 5 minutes to complete. Discussion of Results and Conclusions The collected data were analyzed using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test in R (R Core Team, 2022). The results of the first task showed that the nominalized version of the Restaurant scenario had caused participants to rate the responsibility of the agent in the accident significantly lower than its responsibility in the non-nominalized version (W=16831, p<.001, r=0.2). No effect of nominalization was found for either question in the Environment scenario, nor for the question asking about the amount of damage in the Restaurant scenario. The results of the second task mirrored the results in the first task. Participants had rated the responsibility of the agent in the nominalized version of the scenario significantly lower compared to their responsibility in the non-nominalized version (W=4063.5, p<.001, r=0.46). In general, the findings confirmed the role of nominalization in concealing agency and responsibility in discourse (e.g., Fairclough, 2003, 2015; Fowler, 1991; Fowler et al., 2018). The results also showed that nominalization had no effect on the assessment of damage. One possible explanation could be that the relationship between an action (encoded as a verb) and its resulting damage is not directly reflected in language. This would have caused participants not to be affected by the nominalized/non-nominalized forms of the verb in assessing the damage. By contrast, since the responsibility of the agent is encoded in the verb in the form of active vs. nominalized verbs, participants have possibly found it perceptually salient. Thus, their answer to the responsibility question has been affected accordingly. The fact that no nominalization effect was found in the Environment scenario also needs explanation. One possibility is that familiar topics like environmental pollution are part of people’s background knowledge and people attend less to the textual details such as the use of nominalizations when they are reading familiar topics. Second possibility would be the inanimacy of the agent in the Environment scenario which would have caused participants to have an obscured perception of agency in the first place. Further research is needed to examine these hypotheses in detail. In this study, we empirically explored the effect of nominalization on the perception of agency in discourse. Our results showed that nominalized verbs caused significantly lower degrees of responsibility attribution to agents than did active verbs. The findings confirm the ideological effect of nominalization in hiding agency and responsibility. Texts full with nominalizations should raise suspicions for possible evasion of responsibility. The findings also underline the influence linguistic structures can exercise on thought and perception even within a language.
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