Wong, Jock (2016). The academic practice of citation. In Alessandro Capone, Ferenc Kiefer, & Franco Lo Piparo (Eds.), Indirect reports and pragmatics: Interdisciplinary studies (pp. 189-209). Cham: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-21395-8_10
It is proposed in this paper that citation is primarily about (i) the use of evidence and data to support one’s ideas, and (ii) the sharing of resources and building up of knowledge. It is further hypothesized that how a citation is worded can reflect its strength of claim. Learners of academic English, who need to learn how to use the citation style applicable to their discipline, should ideally also learn what the invariant meaning of citation is about and how to use it to express the strength of claim of what they want to say.
In the discussion of the meaning of citation, this paper showcases a methodology, NSM, which allows us to state meaning with maximal clarity and precision. The NSM methodology has been used extensively to explicate lexical, grammatical and pragmatic meanings. As this paper shows, it can in fact be used to describe anything that has meaning, even if the ‘expression’ cannot fall neatly into any of these linguistic categories.
