On shifts and bridges: reference applied to scientific popularization

ABSTRACT This academic paper aims to apply the concepts of Linguistics in order to evidence an epistemological understanding of scientific popularization articles. Concepts of reference, such as ordinary and scientific language, were used as theoretical foundation, as well as the idea of negotiation between reader and author. The corpora analyzed comprise two articles written by scientists from the magazine Ciência Hoje of the International Year of Chemistry. The results confirmed the initial hypothesis that there were marks in the text that could be understood as a negotiation between common sense and scientific knowledge.