Introduction: Linguistic and discourse issues in contemporary scientific communication. Aspects of communicating science to a variety of audiences

Faced with the fact that descriptions of language actually fail to convey its inherent sense of power, Halliday has, on more than one occasion, emphasized the paradox implicit in the abundance of writing on the creative effects of language, both in the positive (literary stylistics) and in the negative (critical discourse analysis). Because science is part and parcel of people's real lives, and because it influences most aspects of everyday existence, this is intuitively also the area where such evidence is most strongly needed, both to make knowledge accessible to the public at large and to render the scientist's personal stance and/or bias explicit. This is an area where Halliday has made a significant contribution, showing, notably, how thematic structure is the driving force of scientific writing, particularly in the way in which thematic progression is used in the construction of argument, how grammatical metaphor, particularly in the form of nominalization, is important, and how both of these phenomena are linked in scientific discourse (Halliday 1988, 1994, 1998). All of this in turn opens up more possibilities for the ordinary citizen to make informed and responsible choices as well as to help their voice to be perceived as worthy of consideration, i.e. to make it 'heard'. This paper, an Introduction to the Special Section of the Journal of Pragmatics on 'Linguistic and Discourse Issues in Contemporary Scientific Communication', aims to offer a small but hopefully still meaningful and significant contribution to responding precisely to this need.