## Rhetorical evolution of oppositional discourse in French academic writing Oppositional discourse in academic writing

## Abstract

We here analyze the quantitative and qualitative evolution of academic conflict (AC) in a corpus of 90 medical articles published between 1810 and 1995. The linguistic means expressing AC were recorded in each paper and classified according to whether they expressed a direct or an indirect conflict.  The frequency of each category of AC was first recorded in each paper, and then calculated per 20-year periods. Our results were analyzed using Chi-square tests. In the whole corpus, direct AC were more frequent than indirect ones (p = .0001). When analyzed per 20-year periods, our quantitative results allowed us to divide the 185 years studied into 2 distinct periods, the cutting-off point being the 1910's when the frequency of indirect AC started a slow but continuous ascent. In each Block direct AC outnumbered indirect ones (p =.0001), but indirect AC were more frequent in Block B than in Block A (p = .039). A qualitative analysis of the AC recorded revealed that both 19th and 20th century AC were expressed in a personal, polemical and authoritarian manner, although the confrontational stance of late 20th century AC tends to be mitigated either by means of hedging expressions or through the shifting of person to object thematization. We conclude that when formulating their professional disagreement, French-speaking scientists have always been authoritative, categorical, direct and personal, although the tone of voice of confrontations tends to be more 'low key' as we approach the turn of the 21st century.

## 1. Introduction

In his book Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (1987), Latour offers us a highly competitive, almost adversarial  (rather  than  cooperative)  view  of  (Anglo-American)  science. This is why he uses military strategy metaphors when referring to scientific activity in general: for him, writers 'fortify themselves' so as to be able to 'withstand the assaults of a hostile environment', they 'mobilize allies' or 'lure' them away from their competitors, they 'change camps', 'construct successive lines of defense,' etc. More specifically, when referring to intertextuality (i.e., the use of source texts), Latour (1987: 3738) states that:

* Françoise Salager-Meyer Universidad de Los Andes Apartado 715 Mérida 5101 Venezuela (fmeyer@telcel.net.ve)

'Whatever the tactics, the general strategy is easy to grasp: do whatever you need to the former literature to render it as helpful as possible for the claims you are going to make. The rules are simple enough: weaken your enemies, paralyze those you cannot weaken ... help your allies if they are attacked ... oblige your enemies to fight one another; if you are not sure of winning, be humble and understated.'

The rhetoric of academic conflict (to which the above paragraph obviously  refers)  has  been  addressed  from  various  standpoints.  Ziman (1968),  MacRoberts  and  MacRoberts  (1984),  Myers  (1989),  Swales (1990), North (1992), Kourilova (1994), Belcher (1995) and Schramm (1996) -who dealt with that issue in AngloAmerican academic discourse from a very general perspective -all  underscore the fact that scientists today meticulously avoid personal attacks in order to maintain a  free  flow  of  information,  and  that  when  challenging  previously published  research  results  and/or  conclusions,  epistemic  modality  or subtle hedging strategies are used abundantly. Chubin and Moitra (1975) and  Moravcsik  and  Murugesan  (1975),  for  their  part,  focused  on  the quantitative aspect of the problem, and report that total criticism and even 'partial negational references' are rare in English academic writing, thereby supporting the claim that blunt criticism is offensive and threatening in contemporary research articles. On the other hand, Swales and Feak (1995) and MottaRoth (1998) discuss, inter  alia, negative evaluation in book reviews - a topic related to academic conflict -from a crossdiscipline perspective, whereas Kourilova (1996) analyzes critical comments in peer reviews of papers written by nonnative Englishspeaking scientists. These authors reach the conclusion that criticism to prior texts in research articles is much more subtle and implicit than  critical  speech  acts  in  book  reviews  and  referees'  comments  on manuscripts submitted for publication. Finally, the issue of AC has been addressed  from  a  crosslinguistic/crosscultural  standpoint.  Nguyen (1988), Do (1989), and Farrell (1997), for instance, interestingly note that defending one's position and rejecting others' may not seem to be obvious  evidence  of  academic  achievement  in  Vietnamese  students' papers.  In  the  same  vein,  Taylor  and  Chen  (1991)  and  Bloch  and  Li

(1995) point out that Chinese scientists -unlike their English counterparts -tend to avoid focusing on previous research gaps and shortcomings.  Along  the  same  lines,  Ahmad's  study  (1997)  revealed  that Malaysian academics rarely criticize or evaluate previously published research, and Duszak (1994, 1997) remarks that, unlike English, languages such as German, Polish and Czech are low on text forms in judgments of academic achievement and quality of research. It is then clear from these works that the verbalization (directness or hedginess) and the frequency of critical speech acts are language and culturebound (for a recent analysis of this issue -analyzed, though, from a broad ELT perspective-see Kubota 1999).

However interesting the above mentioned research may be, it only refers to the pragmatic phenomenon of academic conflict (thereafter referred to as AC) in passing (i.e., as a relatively minor point in connection with some other of interest), and therefore does not provide an exhaustive treatment of the problem. There has been, to my knowledge, only one study dealing specifically with that issue in contemporary academic prose: it is Hunston's cross-disciplinary research (she analyzed articles from biochemistry, sociolinguistics and history) that brings further evidence to the fact that 'incorrect knowledge claims' or direct attack upon  existing  claims  are  very  unlikely  to  be  found  in  contemporary scientific  articles  written  in  English,  and  that  the  linguistic  strategies used  to  convey  disagreement  are  disciplinespecific.  Nonetheless, aware of the rather reduced size of her corpus (6 papers only), Hunston herself remarked that further study was clearly necessary as many of the knowledge claims she made in her paper required validation from data of other kinds.

## 2. Purpose

Motivated by our own interest in crosslinguistic/crosscultural studies of academic writing and by Hunston's observation, in 1995 we initiated a research project, the broad objective of which was to address the issue of AC from a diachronic perspective -an aspect of the problem so far undealt with 1 -and in a much wider trilingual (English, French and Spanish)  corpus  of  academic  prose.  The  results  obtained  from  the English sample texts studied are reported elsewhere in Salager- Meyer (1998a, b, and c and 1999) and Zambrano (1999). Our intention with the present article is to build on, complement and enrich our knowledge of  AC  by  reporting  the  results  obtained  from  the French corpus,  a language  which,  as  Dressen  (1998)  so  rightly  points  out,  has  only received scant attention from linguists and LSP practitioners in spite of the fact that it is one of the world's leading scientific languages. 2

1 In  their  excellent  historical  studies  of  English  academic  prose,  Atkinson  (1992, 1996), Bazerman (1988) and Valle (1991, 1993 and 1999) do analyze the problem of intertextuality (i.e., the evolution of citation practices in general) and refer to dispute and debate in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, but they do not specifically analyze the issue of academic confrontations.

More specifically, the aim of the present paper is to analyze, over a 185  year-period  (see  'Materials  and  Methods'  section  below),  the evolution -in terms of frequency and form-of the linguistic/rhetorical  strategies  French  scientists  resorted  to  in  order  to  convey  their academic disagreement or professional dispute, i.e., how their conflicting knowledge claims were presented and argued for over the time period studied. As Atkinson (1996: 334) points out:

'Assuming the close interrelatedness of language and social activity, the study of evolving linguistic and textual practices can provide us with  a  powerful  perspective  on  the  developing  scientific  'form  of life'.'

A 'knowledge claim' is generally understood as an item in a research article which scientists put forward to be added to the sum of the knowledge- bank agreed upon by the community of the discipline they belong to (Swales 1990). A 'conflicting knowledge claim' is thus to be understood as a differential between knowledge claims (Hunston 1993).

## 3. Materials and methods

We decided to select journal articles (and not textbook sections) as our primary source material. The characterization presented in the following Results and Discussion sections is then based on the analysis of 90

2 Apart from Dressen's comparative study of geology papers written in French and in English (1998), a few noteworthy exceptions could also be mentioned: Régent (1980, 1985), Montgomery (1996), Crosnier (1997), Donahue (1998) and Bachschmidt (1998) who all point out -to a varying degree, though-that the concept of science differs from one culture to the other (the French and the AngloAmerican), thus explaining the differences in discursive and communicative speech acts these researchers observed between the two languages.

randomly chosen articles written in French by nativeFrench speakers 3 and published in 22 different French medical journals between 1810 and 1995. The source journals were in the main generalist rather than specialist medical periodicals. Articles were taken from 1810 and thereafter at 20 yearinterval up to 1995 (the last period covers 25 years), each 20- year period being made up of 10 articles. The articles chosen in this manner totaled a number of 191,450 running words. Although the question of how many articles to include in studies of this kind is always a difficult one, I consider that the corpus under study is large enough to reveal major trends. Indeed, as Fox (1999) explains:

'Whereas general language corpora are recommended to be as large as possible, investigations into technical and professional languages have  demonstrated  the  representativeness  of  small-domain  specific corpora, totaling 20,000-30,000 running words ...., a consequence of the restrictions of specialized languages: predictable topics, limited syntactic structures of unusual distribution and specialized vocabulary.'

Finally, in order to get an accurate picture of the data distribution, it was decided to use fulllength papers -instead of a given length of papers-as our basic unit of analysis.

The selection of 19th century source journals from which we sought our sample texts was mostly based on the availability of materials 4 . The choice of the 20th century journals from which we sought our sample texts was made on the basis of two specialists informants' recommendations (both active medical researchers) as to which French medical journals  they  considered  most  prestigious  (see  Conrad  1996  for  the importance of selecting leading journals in corpusbased research), and with the help of two librarians who provided us with a list of the most frequently consulted medical journals written in French.

Our 19th century medical articles included: 1) narratives of single cases or diseases which were then called ' mémoires et observations '.

3 Native- French speaker status was assessed on the basis of the authors' last names and of institutional affiliation (especially the address of the first named author). Moreover,  I  use  the  expression  'French  medical  journals/periodicals'  to  refer  to  medical periodicals written in French, whether these are printed in France, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, etc.

4 Our  corpus  was  collected  from  the  library  of  the Faculté  de  Médecine (Claude Bernard) Lyon (France).

All these were somewhat similar in function to the present day English 'case report'; 2) summation of knowledge articles then generally labeled ' revue scientifique ', and 3) experimental reports which started appearing  in  the  closing  years  of  the  19th  century.  Our  20th  century medical articles consisted of original research papers ( mémoires originaux ),  survey  or  review  articles  (' mise  au  point ')  and  case  reports (' études de cas '). Book reviews, laboratory reports, letters to the editor and articles such as discussions of ethical and/or sociological issues of medical practice, salary, work conditions, etc. were excluded.

The approach adopted in the present study is textbased. Because in such an approach, texts are read and interpreted by one reader only, the question  is  often  raised  as  to  whether  this  is  not  too  subjective  and whether  other  analysts  would  not  get  different  results.  Moreover,  as Valle  (1999)  remarks:  'A  project  in  which  the  study  is  outside  the writer's own discipline necessarily requires help from members of the scientific community under study.' As a response to this 'subjective reading' problem and to Valle 's observation (i.e., in order to validate our own reading interpretation), we asked for the cooperation of 'specialistinformants/subjectmatter specialists', a practice highly recommended in all kinds of LSPrelated discourse analysis (e.g., Selinker 1979).  We  thus  quite  frequently  held  informal  discussions  with  and sought, when necessary, the advice of the two previously mentioned medical researchers whose specialist insight into usage helped us classify the AC encountered per category (see below) whenever we had a doubt in that respect.

Since we were concerned with the repertoire of rhetorical strategies used by French scientists to express their AC, the linguistic realizations of the statements which reflected a discrepancy between the stance of a writer and that of an identified fellow scientist -or that of the scientific community as a collective entity-were recorded in each one of our 90 sample texts. The AC thus recorded were divided into 2 broad categories  according  to  their  level  of  directness/indirectness  -or involvement/detachment (Chafe 1982).

- a) Direct AC (or straightforward, overt 'attack'): a strong, unmodulated assertion to  which the writer fully commits him/herself, i.e., s/he

takes full responsibility of the truth of the propositional content of the utterance (ex. 1 and 2 below). 5

1. Le traitement proposé par Monsieur Després, et qui consisterait à cautériser dès le début, est totalement inutile et inacceptable. (1881)
2. La seule classification de Durie et Salmon (1978) n'est plus actuellement suffisante pour apprécier de façon fiable le pronostic du MM (myélome multiple) (1989)

b) Indirect AC (a covert, subdued or 'polite' AC): the writer's commitment to the truth of the proposition is mitigated in one of two ways: a) through the use of hedging devices (ex. 3); b) by what I will refer to a 'thematization shift', a procedure that consists in shifting the responsibility of the AC away from the writer to some inanimate facts (e.g., a result, a conclusion as in ex. 4):

3. Il y a un point essentiel que M. Maisonneuve semble perdre de vue (1850).
4. Le premier rapport  de Mellstedt, publié en 1979, était encourageant. Cependant,  nos études ultérieures n'ont pas confirmé ces premiers résultats. (1979)

The number of direct and indirect AC was recorded in each article and then calculated for each one of the nine 20-year-periods. The frequency of occurrence (expressed as percentages) of direct and indirect AC with respect to the total number of AC recorded in each 20-year-period and in the whole corpus 6 was then calculated. The data thus obtained were analyzed  using  nonparametric  X2  test  for  contingency  tables  to determine whether statistically significant differences were put forward with respect to the evolution of the 2 previously mentioned AC categories over time . Alpha value was set up at p<.05. Finally, in order to enhance  the  internal  validity  of  the  present  study  and  to  follow Connor's sound advice that 'researchers need to provide objectivity in their analyses through interrater reliability' (Connor, 1996: 165), the data were recorded and analyzed by one of our subjectspecialists in a sample of 10 medical articles. Interrater reliability was .86.

5 The year that appears at the end of each example refers to the year of publication of the  paper  from  which  the  example  was  drawn;  the  italicized  words/expressions correspond to direct AC, and the underlined ones to indirect AC.

6 If, for example, a criticism was directed at Maisonneuve (1966) several times in the same paper, this was recorded as one (1) AC only.

## 4. Quantitative results

## 4.1. Overall distribution of AC (in the whole corpus)

As can be seen on Table 1, a total of 277 AC was recorded in the French corpus as a whole (an average of 3 AC per article). These were distributed as follows: 249 direct and 28 indirect AC, the former accounting for 89.9% and the latter for only 10.1% of the total number of AC recorded in the whole corpus. In other words, direct AC significantly outnumbered indirect AC (p= .0001).

Now, if we examine our quantitative results per 20year period  -as shown in Figure 1 which displays the evolution (expressed in percentages) of direct and indirect AC per 20- year period-, it can readily be seen that the 185 period studied can be divided into 2 distinct Blocks, the 1910's representing the cuttingof period when indirect AC started a  slow  but  continuous  ascent:  Block  A  which  covers  100  years (1810- 1909),  and  Block  B  that  covers  the  remaining  85  years (1910- 1995).  Let  us  now  analyze  more  closely  the  evolution  of  the direct/indirect AC ratio over time (Table 1 and Figure 1).

Block A

100 years

(1810-1909)

50 texts

AMINEs number

of AC Her tHEt

Block B

85 year=

(1910-1995)

40 testa

1 AC per bed

TOTAL

twhole carpur

Averaga number of AC per

bout in whale corpus

NS: not satistically signifionot differencs TABLE 1

GLOBAL and DIACHRONIC RESULTS

Direct and Indirect Academic Conflicts (AC) per Block and in the Whole

Corpus: Abealute Values and Proportionn

## DIRECT AC INDIRECT AC TOTAL

153

10

163

| *93.9% + 1-200.   | 76.196 +            | 58.5%     |
|-------------------|---------------------|-----------|
| • 3               | 02                  | F00 3.2   |
| 95 +84.27=        | 18 - 15.7% +        | 114 41.1% |
| 24 249 89.996 -   | 1=000 0.4 28 -10.1% | 2.8 277   |

106 ÷

40 +

Pipan 1

Budluban of Diradi usd Inciraci Acadeade

Dartoba (AC) PAT Huaar perlodt

<!-- image -->

## 4.2. Block-discriminated evolution

## Block A (1810-1909)

Direct AC significantly outnumbered their indirect counterparts not only in each one of the 20year periods of Block A (see Figure 1), but also in Block A as a whole. In fact, Table 1 indicates that direct AC make up 93.8% of the total number of AC recorded during that Block, and in- direct AC only account for 6.1% of that total (p= .0001). Table 1 also shows that there was an average of 3 direct AC vs. .02 indirect AC per paper in Block A.

## Block B (19101995)

As  we  said  before,  from  the  1910's  on  (see  Figure  1),  indirect  AC started exhibiting what could be qualified as a continuous -although slow-ascent. Indeed, during the 19101929 period, indirect AC make up 9% of the total number of AC recorded during that 20 yearperiod; they then slowly increase to 10% (19301949), 12% (19501969) and finally  to  19%  (19701995).  Nonetheless,  in  each  20  yearperiod, indirect AC were always much less frequent than their direct counterpart. Indeed, as Table 1 shows, in Block B direct AC significantly (p= .0001) outweigh indirect AC (84.2% vs. 15.7% respectively of the total number of AC recorded in Block B). Table 1 also shows that the average number of direct AC per article was 2.4 vs. 0.4 for indirect AC.

## Block A vs. Block B

Although the overall frequency of direct AC decreased from Block A to Block B (93.8% vs. 84.2% of the total number of AC recorded in Block A and B respectively), the difference was not found to be statistically significant. Conversely -and here lies, we believe, the most interesting quantitative finding displayed on Table 1-the  overall  frequency  of indirect AC significantly increased from Block A to Block B. Indeed, Table 1 shows that their frequency is much greater in Block B -where they make up 15.7% of the total number of AC recorded in that Block-than  in  Block  A  -where  they  only  account  for  6.1%  of  the  total number of AC recorded in that Block. The difference between these two figures was found to be significant (p= .03).

In other words, although the frequency of indirect AC has always been  very  low  when  compared  to  that  of  direct  AC  over  the  whole period studied, our quantitative findings clearly indicate that indirect AC are much more frequent in medical articles published in the 20th century (especially from the 1970's on) than they were in articles published between 1810 and 1909.

## 5. Discussion

## 5.1. Overall quantitative results (18101995)

Our overall (i.e., not Blockdiscriminated) quantitative findings have clearly put forward that direct AC are much more frequent than indirect AC not only in the whole corpus but also in each Block (they throughout the period studied account for over than 80% of the total number of AC recorded). By contrast, indirect AC were found to be very rare over the  185  year  studied.  These  2  findings  hence  support  Motchane's (1990) and Régent's (1994) position according to which French scientists uphold an authoritative and categorical behaviour from the very beginning of their papers:

'Dès le début, l'auteur français se montre catégorique et prescriptif. ... Dans les conclusions, l'auteur français, en position dominante, garde  son  autorité.  Il  se  pose  en  détenteur  du  savoir  ....  Ceci  est  très fréquent en français où les auteurs ne ménagent pas leur peine pour faire la leçon à leurs collègues. On peut parler de stratégies de condescendance ... Il est rare que des stratégies aussi explicites soient utilisées en anglais. Les marques que l'on peut observer en anglais sont plutôt du registre de l'innuendo.' (Régent 1984: 58)

Along the same lines, the overall very low frequency of indirect AC reported in the present paper is in agreement with previous research that argues that French academics are not prone to modulate their discourse, at least not as much as English academics do (see the absence of  blunt criticism in AngloAmerican academic prose alluded to in the Introduction of this paper). This even led Sionis (1997: 211) to refer to the 'exaggerated  selfconfidence  of  French  academics'  who  therefore sound arrogant to AngloAmerican scientists (for a discussion of the pedagogical implications of such an observation, see Crosnier 1995, Birsh- Bécaas 1997 and Zambrano 1999).

Our global results thus confirm the fact that courtesy and tactfulness are  eminently  cultural  manifestations (Kreutz  1997  and  Kreutz  and Harres 1997, Ventola 1997), and that it is possible to identify national academic styles that can be traced back to different intellectual styles and attitudes towards knowledge and learning which, as Clyne (1981, 1987) puts forth, are passed on from generation to generation through the education system and are deeply embedded in cultural and rhetorical assumptions about what material may be presented, how it is to be organized and how it may be presented in a maximally acceptable way (Motchane 1990, Birch Becáas 1997).

We will now focus our attention in the remainder of this paper on the analysis  of  the  qualitative/rhetorical  evolution of  direct  and  indirect AC.

## 5.2. Qualitative evolution of Direct AC

Before getting to the heart of the matter regarding the qualitative evolution of AC over the 185 years studied, I would like to point out that AC --as most pragmatic textual features-cannot always be isolated or identified as individual words or phrases because they are built into the text structure as a whole. However, for lack of space, I cannot but illustrate the various points I present and discuss in the remainder of this paper with examples taken out of their broader contextual environment. I thus hope that they will be conspicuous enough so as to support my arguments.

## 5.2.1. Early direct AC (Block A: 18101909)

The main qualitative features of the French direct AC recorded in Block A were not only their highly personal character, but also their offensive and scathing tone of voice. The following examples give plentiful evidence  of  the  unrestrained  -sometimes  biting  and  sarcastic  (ex.  5 below) -character of these early AC, of the writers' affective involvement and of a strong authorial presence (what Atkinson called 'authorial persona').

5. Lisfranc avait réussi à réduire une luxation qui datait de 4 mois . Une heure après, nous allâmes voir le malade: il était mort. (1850)
6. Pour vous prouver l'inanité de la proposition de M. Pellarin ,  je n'ai qu'à vous dire quel a été en 1865, en France et en Algérie, le mode de généralisation de cette maladie dans l'armée. (1866)
7. Les expériences de M. Colin ont été mal faites . Ces expériences n'ont aucune valeur . (1881)
8. La 'bouche d'argent', dûe à l'invention de Brasseur ou de Billot, et l'instrument en bois dont se servait Belhomme sont complètement  abondonnés  aujourd'hui .  Non  seulement  ces  appareils ne peuvent rendre aucun service , mais la violence qu'ils exigent peuvent devenir dans certains cas la cause d'accidents regrettables , tels que les fractures de dents. (1898).

We even recorded an example (ex. 10 below) where the offense was so great that only the initial letter of the criticized doctor's surname was provided:

9. La patiente se rendit ensuite à F., chez le sieur S...., un de ces nombreux charlatans qui exploitent la bêtise humaine à l'abri de nos lois . (1888).

Examples 5- 9 above illustrate how 19th century scientists overtly criticized their colleagues on various grounds (poorly carried out experiments, disagreement as to methods/procedures used or type of treatment administered, etc.) by fully committing themselves when denying the  reported  propositions.  Moreover,  these  examples  beautifully  demonstrate the provocative, highly polemical, acrimonious and personal (almost face to face) and dialogic fashion in which 19th century French scientists  used  to  convey  their  disagreement,  a  manner  which  could then  be  assimilated  to  that  adopted  by  Englishspeaking  scientists today when taking a critical stand in private or orally (Dubois 1981, Gilbert and Mulkay 1984, Basturkmen 1999, Jacoby and McNamara 1999) 7 .

Quite frequently too at that time were AC directed not towards a precisely identified individual (or group of individuals who could be seen as characters in a narrative; examples 5 to 9 above), but to the scientific community as a collective entity -what Valle (1999: 91) refers to as 'non- citational attribution'; most of these, as examples 10 to 12 below illustrate, used to challenge a method, a treatment or a commonly held belief/ concept.

10. D'autres  praticiens,  parmi  lesquels  on  rencontre  malheureusement des noms célèbres , malgré tout ce que l'on savait sur le sel métallique, l'ont administré à des doses effrayantes dans de nombreux cas. (1828).
11. J'ai moi- même pendant lomgtemps tenu en grande venération ce concept défendu par de nombreux collègues . Mais enfin, j'ai vu tant de fois et de si près ses défauts et sa fragilité , que je me vois contraint de l'ébranler. (1850).

7 I allude to 'Englishspeaking scientists' only because the observation mentioned refers to an Englishspeaking environment. It is very likely that the same remark would apply as well to a Frenchspeaking context, but, as far as I am aware, it has not been formally reported in the literature.

12. D'après M. le docteur Béard, cette maladie serait une conséquence pathologique des chatouillements; elle résulterait d'une singulière habitude propre aux habitants de ce pays de se chatouiller les uns  les  autres  dans  les  bois. Le  bromure  de  potassium,  recommendé par nombre de mes collègues, a été employé chez ces malades sans aucun succès . En réalité, aucune médication n'a réussi. (1881).

As can be observed, the tone of voice of these 'anonymous' or more 'general' AC is somewhat less adversarial than that of personal direct AC, although the writer, as was the case with the personal direct AC, here too takes total responsibility of his confrontational stance.

Other AC directed towards the scientific community as a whole were also used to describe a 'gap' in the literature (ex. 13 below), but these were much less frequent at that time because scientists did not feel the need (as they do today, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world) to create a research space for themselves. As Bazerman (1988) explains when referring to 19th century academic discourse -but his remark seems to apply as well to its French counterpart- in the 1800's, the literature was  used  to  draw  lines  and  marshal  forces  rather  than  construct  an edifice beyond the immediate claim.

13. J'ai fait bien des recherches pour m'assurer si la maladie dont je vais tracer l'histoire a été observée et décrite. Jusqu'à ce jour, elles ont été infructueuses. Je n'ai rien trouvé de décrit et de précis à cet égard  dans  les  auteurs  français  et  latins  de  ma  bibliothèque. Il m'est difficile de penser qu'une maladie aussi simple n'ait pas été observée et décrite avant moi. (1830).

It should be reminded at this point that most of what was published in early 19th century medical journals were printed versions of talks delivered on subjects of interest to fellow physicians which mainly remained at the level of the anecdotal, i.e., histories of particular and generally unusual cases -what Biber (1988) labeled 'involved production' and Atkinson (1996: 359) 'the rhetoric of immediate experience' -rather than  the  accumulation  of  series  of  cases  examined  to  reach  general principles. The manifestation of professional arrogance (especially well illustrated in ex. 5 to 9 above) could perhaps be considered as a reflection of the essentially narrative, oral and anecdotal status of these early texts whose prominent authors/actors were probably not much concerned about the rhetorical impact, personal offense or possible threat their critiques could engender! This remark lends support to Skelton's obser- vation (1997: 52) regarding 19th century British Medical Journal articles, according to which truthvalue judgments were strongly associated with the first person pronoun 'I' that proves an 'overt arrogation of responsibility'.  It  would  thus  seem  that  this  'overt  arrogation  of  responsibility'  when  taking  a  critical  stand  is  a  rhetorical  hallmark  of 19th century medical writing and, I would venture to posit, perhaps of 19th century academic writing in general.

It is interesting to note that, contrary to early direct English AC (cf. SalagerMeyer 1999), 19th century French AC were not prefaced by lukewarm or 'pre-mitigating' (Valle 1999: 29) epithets of politeness and  praise,  referred  to  in  the  literature  as  'courtesy  markers'  (Valle 1991, 1993; Atkinson 1996) or 'manners of dispute' (Shapin 1984). Such epithets -that were used by British scientists to provide a note of profound deference towards the criticized fellow-were  notoriously absent from the 'negative' context of French direct AC. No genteel or gentlemanly conduct, no elaborate politeness from 19th century French scientists who rather proved to be pitiless towards the addressees they disagreed with! One example only (underlined utterance of ex. 14 below) of a somewhat condescending attitude towards a colleague who, apparently, was on the wrong track, could be found in our corpus:

14. Malgré ses défauts, cette méthode fut suivie par Kramer, Riedel, Véring et Itard.... Rosenthal, de Berlin, opéra une véritable confusion. Tout ceci démontre de la manière la plus concluante l'inanité de la classification proposée par Hubert- Valleroux qui s'ajoute à celle de Curtis, de Whright et de quelques autres tout aussi peu sérieuses . Nous ne saurions admettre les divisions de Hubert - Valleroux ..... Comment se faitil que ceci ait été complètement négligé par M. HubertValleroux? ... C'est fort de cette conviction que nous lui avons dit la vérité tout entière (à M. HubertValleroux) car il nous semble de ceux à qui elle est dûe parce qu'ils sont dignes de l'entendre. (1894)

Such  courtesy  markers  were  quite  frequently  used,  however,  but  in 'positive' contexts of praise, e.g.,

15. Je demandai donc à M. Paul Blondeau, pharmacien très distingué , de m'aider de ses lumières et de sa science (1866).
16.  M. Scoutetten, un savant du plus grand mérite et des plus justement honoré et estimé , est parvenu à démontrer que les bains de Pennès exercent deux actions: l'une dynamique, l'autre excitante (1867).

Apart from depicting a personal and direct way of presenting conflicting claims, examples 5 through 14 reflect an individually, privately-, author- based  and  nonspecialized  medicine  practiced  by  a  small, non- professionalized and highly 'visible' (Dudley- Evans and Henderson  1993)  scientific  community  where  physicians,  especially those with a particular interest in the issues being discussed, were familiar with the authorities cited in scientific papers; perhaps, they even knew them personally. These examples also provide clear evidence of the ongoingness of scientific debate at that time, although this debate, as  Gunnarsson (1994) remarked, was based more on the physician's personal experience than on a body of 'depersonalized' knowledge, accumulated  over  time  through  systematic  and  rigorous  observation and experimentation.

Noteworthy in our results, finally, is the finding that in the 19th and early 20th century papers, the great majority of AC tended to appear in a diffused and unpredictable fashion throughout the article, i.e., contrary to what occurred in later periods (see V .2.2 below), they were not associated with any particular phase of the article. Then, 19th century French AC were potentially appropriate at any stage of the 'unfolding drama' being reported or, as Skelton so vividly puts it (1997: 51) of the ' mise en scène ,'  a  rhetorical  practice  which,  as  we  will  see  later,  is unacceptable in today's research article writing.

## 5.2.2. Later direct AC (Block B: 19101995)

The first and most important distinctive feature between earlier (Block A) and later (Block B) direct AC lies in the change in the tone of voice of the latter which, as examples 17 to 20 below illustrate, is less harsh and less arrogant, although the writer' s affective involvement in each case is undubitable:

17. Les premières expériences de Donders furent effectuées sans le contrôle  de  l'éclairage  focal,  indispensable pour  mettre  en  lumière une transparence parfaite. (1912)
18. Nonobstant ce détail, l'opération de M. Macnamara était excellente, bien  qu'elle  fut  susceptible  d'amélioration  considérable (1924).
19. Je serais plus sûr de ces résultats statistiquement parlant si le nombre de cas présentés par J.L. Faure était plus considérable ... et si le  5.5% de mortalité opératoire que la statistique inflige à J.L.

Faure ne reposait pas sur une seule mort. ... Si le professeur Hartman attachait plus d'importance à la statistique, il n'aurait pas tendance à revenir à sa colpo- hystérectomie (1933).

20. Tout  en  concluant  à  l'efficacité  de  l'acide  sulfanilamide, Helhmolz, de la Clinique Mayo, ne fournit aucune statistique . (1952)

As can be seen from the above examples, criticisms mostly refer to the inadequacy  of  a  method/practice  used  by  a  clearly  identified  fellow scientist  and/or  to  the  lack  of  statistical  data,  the  latter  'flaw'  being especially frequent in mid19th century French medical papers.

The same qualitative remark applies as well to later direct AC that were directed towards the scientific community in general. These were either challenging a belief (ex. 21), expressing a knowledge gap (ex. 22 and 24), or criticizing poorly carried out or inconclusive research ( ex. 23) and/or unfounded conclusions (ex. 25).

21. On a invoqué .... la persistence de germes dans la gorge. C'est un argument qui ne tient pas devant les faits . (1937)
22. Si nous étudions la littérature médicale sur le sujet, nous sommes surpris  de  trouver  une bibliographie  à  peu  près  inexistante . (1938).
23. Des expérimentateurs ont tenté d'éclaircir l'étiologie obscure de cette  affection  maligne  mais rien  d'absolu  n'est  sorti  de  leurs expériences . (1938)
24. La connaissance de la nature du facteur est encore incomplète . Il y a beaucoup de points obscurs malgré les nombreux travaux faits dans ce domaine. (1959).
25. Il est donc abusif d'appliquer le terme de dépistage à la recherche optique de B.K. .... De tels rapprochements (avec l'examen radiologique systématique) ne sont fondés ni dans les mots ni dans les faits . (1969).

The second feature that distinguishes between earlier (Block A) and later (Block B) French direct AC refers to those AC that were recorded in articles published after the 1970's, more specifically to the way criticized sources were formally cited. Indeed, in the last 3 decades studied, the criticized authors' surnames started being mentioned into brackets (i.e.,  not  integrated  into  the  running  text  as  earlier  AC  were) 8 in  the form  of  what  Swales  (1990)  called  'nonintegral reporting'  or

8 Valle (1999: 397) reports the same finding in her historical study of the life sciences of the 'Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London'.

'non- integral nonreporting' citations, thus pointing to a progressive de- personalization  or  'objectivization'  of  medical  discourse  (ex.  26 below). 9 The ' malheureusement ' of this last example underscores the writer's affective involvement/state.

26. Malheureusement, peu de ces équipes de recherche (Plude 1990, Madden 1990) se sont intéressées à ce que sont les différentes formes d'attention en psychologie (1995).

It should finally be mentioned that the great majority of these later AC was  confined  to  the  introduction  of  contemporary  research  papers, more precisely in that sub-section Swales (1990) refers to as the 'space creating'  omissional,  pseudo-negational  citations,  a  writerly  strategy used to gain greater credibility for one's own claims so as to increase the persuasive force of the text.

## 5.3. Qualitative evolution of Indirect AC

Our quantitative data indicated that indirect AC were very rare throughout the 185 years studied, but that they were more common in Block B than in Block A (15.7% vs. 6.1% of the total number of AC recorded in each Block respectively). In spite of their very low frequency, it is interesting to present and discuss the prevailing features of their  rhetorical evolution.

## 5.3.1. Early indirect AC (Block A: 18101909)

Early indirect AC were mostly mitigated by means of private cognitive verbs such as croire and penser and semi- auxiliaries such as paraî tre et sembler that somewhat  reduced the illocutionary commitment on the writers' side, but still stressed that the disagreement was the writer's personal view.

As was the case with direct AC, indirect AC were either directed to a clearly identified individual (ex. 27 to 29) or to the scientific community in general (ex. 30 and 31). Note the rhetorical question and the irony in example 27!

9 Where integral citations tend to foreground the author cited, nonintegral citations place the author at the margin.

It should be pointed out that from the 1970's on, nonintegral reporting citations started being used for reference citing in general, i.e., whether the reference was negational or not.

27. M. Arnal a til  eu  raison  de  donner  à  cette  maladie  le  nom  de 'fièvre cérébrale?' Je ne le pense pas. Il a fait dans cette circonstance un étrange abus du mot fièvre cérébrale dont il a prouvé qu'il n'avait pas une idée bien claire . M. Arnal voit partout des eryzipèles. (1810)
28. Le procédé que je propose me paraî t l'emporter sur celui proposé par M. Maisonneuve . (1850)
29. Mais je ne crois pas qu'il soit indiqué de toujours cautériser depuis le début, comme le veut M. Deprès . (1881)
30. L'action thérapeutique de la sclérotomie ne paraî t pas suffisamment durable. De nombreuses opérations nous ont laissé l'impression de son insuffisance lointaine . (1900)
31. L'élimination du liquide intraoculaire me paraî t encore inexactement interprétée . Je crois avoir démontré que -en oposition avec la notion presque universellement admise de la filtration des parois vasculaires -le liquide intraoculaire est un produit de sécrétion de l'épithélium ciliaire. (1909)

The writer's involvement is, here too, very obvious, although, as we said  before,  his  responsibility  is  somewhat  downtoned  by  means  of 'impact- attenuating'  hedging  devices  that  make  negative  assertions less categorical (cf. Markkanen and Schröder 1997, and Duszak 1997 for some of the latest publications on the subject).

## 5.3.2. Later indirect AC (Block B: 19091995)

Later indirect AC were similar to earlier ones in the sense that most of them  also  resorted  to  hedges  -these  'sugarcoating'  strategies (Meyer 1997: 21) that make statements 'less negatable' (Hübler 1983). --and were either directed to a clearly identified individual (ex. 32, 33 and 34) or an anonymous scientific community (ex. 35 and 36):

32. Contrairement à ce qu'affirme Köllinger , nous croyons que le faisceau isthmique n'est qu'une formation accidentelle. Néanmoins, il  est  difficile  de  dire  jusqu'à  quel  point  Köllinger  se  trompe. (1914)
33. Cette  éventualité  serait tout  à  fait  plausible  et  l'observation  de Schulmann  et  Solente  pourrait effectivement  faire  penser  à  la prédominance d'un trouble nutritif. Or, il ne me semble pas qu'il en soit ainsi. (1937)
34. Certains auteurs, comme Lambert, prétendent avoir aussi supprimé les douleurs et les gas chez les opérés avec irradiation infrarouges et ultraviolettes. (1938)

35. On connaî t la formule: '....' Nous y souscririons bien volontiers, mais nous ne pensons pas qu'on puisse réduire tout le problème à une conclusion aussi simple . (1937)
36. La majorité des auteurs pensent que la maladie frappe surtout les muscles des ceintures, bien qu'il ne semble exister aucun élément paraclinique qui puisse soutenir cette hypothèse . (1975)

The use of the verb prétendre in example 34 above is interesting because it by itself implies a disagreement between writer and original researcher (see Leech 1983 and Thompson and Ye 1991 for a thorough classification of attitudinal verbs), thereby giving the reader a hint of the writer's attitude toward the propositional content of the utterance. As Swales and Feak (1995) point out when referring to Western academia, authors imply their attitude toward a source through the choice of reporting verbs.

One of the main difference between earlier and later indirect AC lies in  that  in  the  latter,  writers'  commitment  can  be  further  reduced  by pretending that they are not putting forward the AC by their own accord,  but  that  some  nonhuman entity  actually  speaks  for  itself  and compels them to disagree with some previous finding/conclusion/data. What we observe in examples 37 to 40 below, then, is a phenomenon which could be subsumed under the broad notion of 'shifting of responsibility'  or  of  thematization  from  a  personal  agent  -a  writer/ actor-to  a  'speaking  fact'  which  becomes  the  agent  and  leads  the writer, almost unwillingly, to the AC. Luukka and Markkanen (1997: 168) refer to this rhetorical means as a 'substrategy of impersonalization' which is not uncommon in French medical papers published in the last two decades of the 20th century.

37. Bien que basées sur les mêmes principes que ceux de Bailliart, et poursuivies par des procédés analogues, nos recherches ne nous ont pas conduits à des conclusions identiques . (1920)
38. Les résultats pratiques de la réduction de l'acidité gastrique par les antiacides semblent un peu en contradiction avec nos connaissances sur les relations hyperacidité gastrique et ulcère. (1976)
39. La divergence entre nos résultats et ceux des auteurs japonais est telle que l'on pourrait bien se demander s'il s'agit de la même maladie . (1982)
40. En revanche, nos conclusions contrastent avec les conclusions de Garoux et al. (1985) ... Elles contrastent aussi avec l'hypothèse de Case (1985). (Example drawn from a paper published in 1995)

As we argued before, the linguistic realization of examples 37 to 40 above clearly gives the impression that the AC does not arise from a researcher in the flesh but from the outcome of research experiments which misled the criticized  researchers.  Research  outcomes  are  then attributed a prominent thematic position, whilst the 'authorial persona' (Atkinson 1996) pretends to remain unnoticed, detached and distanced in the AC background as if the AC uttered were beyond his/her control. In such a way, the intervention of the personal element is subtly denied in keeping with an ideal of (unreachable?) scientific objectivity, thereby displaying an essentially 'objectcentered rhetoric' (Atkinson 1996). We are quite far indeed from the author's/actor's 'overt arrogation of responsibility' previously noted regarding 19th century direct AC.  It is worthwhile mentioning that this observation has also been highlighted by Sarjala (1998) in her contrastive study of functions of references to previous research in Finnish/AngloAmerican academic writing.

## 6. Conclusions

Our study clearly showed that direct AC are in general much more frequent than indirect ones over the 185 year-studied, although the latter started increasing, especially since the 1970's on. Throughout the span analyzed, direct AC were found to be highly personal, polemical and writer/author responsible, underscoring the authoritative and categorical  character  of  French-speaking  scientists  already  mentioned-  in very general terms, though-  in the literature. Indirect AC, very rare throughout the period studied, were mitigated either by means of traditional hedging devices or through the use of the rhetorical writerly strategy of thematization shifting, that strategy being a distinctive feature of AC recorded in papers published during the last 2 decades of this century. Lastly, 19th and early 20th century AC were diffused throughout the article, whereas AC drawn from modern texts were found to be mostly confined to the most argumentative parts of research articles, i.e., introduction and discussion sections.

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