홍대용 「의산문답(毉山問答)」의 글쓰기 방식 : 과학 텍스트로서의 특징을 중심으로

Characteristics of 『Uisanmundap』as a scientific text

『Uisanmundap』is one of the prominent works in 18th century in Korea, dealing with principles related to formation of this world and to some basic scientific rules. Since this text has often been regarded as writer’s philosophical synthesis or a literary product, research on its scientific characteristics seldom conducted. 『Uisanmundap』is important, however, not just in that it shows its own method as a scientific text, but also that it remains to be suggestive on the modern scientific writing. This study is concentrated on revealing several characteristics as a scientific text of 『Uisanmundap』; These factors will also offer prospects for the current scientific writings which are proved to have several problems. To begin with, it utilizes several stylistic devices so as to make this text more interesting and to raise its discernibility and quality of contents. In this study, these devices are divided into two; the one is a dual structure consisting of narrativity and non-narrativity. The first part which serves as an introduction is formed as a narrative text in order to facilitate readers’ acceptance of these new ideas. The latter half, on the other hand, assumes to be non-narrative which helps readers to identify the scientific fact more clearly. The other stylistic device is related to the catechetical method, that is, a series of exchange of questions and answers. This device can offer its own scientific reasoning, which is made up of causal serial expressions and associative serial expressions. Apart from these stylistic devices, 『Uisanmundap』utilizes the verbalization of the scientific statements, facilitating readers’ comprehension of difficult ideas. This factor might be regarded as the most important feature of 『Uisanmundap』, since most of the modern scientific texts tend to excessively rely on the opposite function, nominalization. As M. A. K. Halliday asserted in his research, nominalization itself enables scientific texts not only to establish definite entity of the scientific phenomena, but also to include its meaning as a process by changing verbs into nouns. Nonetheless, some studies recently raised a question whether the current features of writing in the modern scientific writings are substantially effective or not. In this study, nominalization is considered as the crux of the matter in scientific writing due to its abuse and limitations on reasoning. Moreover, this verbalization should be differentiated from the stylistic level as mentioned above, because it represents not just the level of expressions but also the way of explanation, organization and even thinking. By composing the scientific texts in the manner of putting the nominalized and verbalized expressions in its proper place, those texts can reduce difficulties in comprehension and make it easier to express the process of scientific phenomena. Nonetheless, some studies recently raised a question whether the current features of writing in the modern scientific writings are substantially effective or not. In this study, nominalization is considered as the crux of the matter in scientific writing due to its abuse and limitations on reasoning. Moreover, this verbalization should be differentiated from the stylistic level as mentioned above, because it represents not just the level of expressions but also the way of explanation, organization and even thinking. By composing the scientific texts in the manner of putting the nominalized and verbalized expressions in its proper place, those texts can reduce difficulties in comprehension and make it easier to express the process of scientific phenomena.