Fearlessly Making the Impossible Possible: A Stylistic Inquiry into DARPA’s Ground-breaking Research

To ensure national defense in the United States (Moreno 2006), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has elaborated a model, known as the “DARPA model” (Bonvillian et al. 2019), that has led to the discovery and development of revolutionary medicine and technology. The implementation of such a model has entailed the surpassing of the limits and ethical concerns of traditional R&D institutions and scientific and medical research in general in favor of military ethical values and priorities (Howe 2003; Miles 2013; Mehlman and Corley 2014; Parasidis 2015) although the agency collaborates with a diverse community including universities, industries, businesses, the government and the public. To reconcile the military (Moreno 2008; Gross 2013) and civilian parts, DARPA has publicly provided information about its model through a variety of texts (official website and framework, description of ongoing research projects, promotional ‘vignettes’) that introduce and sustain its alternative values. By means of the evolving Corpus stylistics methodology, the present study intends to define the explicit and implicit linguistic, discursive and stylistic strategies that are enacted throughout the texts and reflect the unique model of research thought and process of the “DARPA model” that differs both from civilian and military communicative strategies.