Categoricalness in scientific discourse

The article views categoricalness as a communicative category functioning in the scientific discourse and adversely affecting the process of scientific communication. The results of the discourse and contextual analysis of categoricalness revealed its correlation with the communicative categories of politeness, authoritativeness, confidence, subjectivity, and emotionality. The analysis of the texts of scientific reviews, oral discussions, and disputes allowed the authors to conclude that Russian scientific communication is characterized by a high level of categoricalness, which suggests potential conflictogenity in such type of interaction. The article discusses ways of neutralizing categoricalness through the use of several mitigation tools, including lexico-stylistic and syntactical ones, intended to eliminate the destructive component from scientific communication. © Siberian Federal University. All rights reserved