Contentiousness in written medical English discourse: A diachronic study (1810–1995)

Abstract

This article reports the quantitative and qualitative evolution of the linguistic strategies used to convey academic conflict (AC) in medical English discourse between 1810 and 1995. All instances of academic conflict in 90 papers were recorded and classified according to whether they were direct (i.e., straightforward, overt attacks) or indirect (covert, camouflaged criticism). Results were analyzed by means of chi-square tests. Our global quantitative findings indicate that direct instances of academic conflict significantly outnumber indirect instances (p=.0001). However, when analyzed diachronically our data show that our corpus can be clearly divided into two distinct blocks. In Block A (1810-1929), direct academic conflict significantly outweighs indirect conflict (p=.0001), whereas in Block B (1930-1995), this difference is no longer significant. In other words, direct academic conflict significantly decreased over time, whereas indirect academic conflict exhibited a significant increase over the 185 years studied, especially from the 1930s on. From a qualitative standpoint, our study revealed that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century academic conflicts were much more direct, personal (author-responsible), polemical and aggressive than mid- and late twentieth-century conflicts which are characterized as being cautiously mitigated (hedged) and fact-finding-responsible'. The evolution observed mostly mirrors variations in the degree of deference towards the authors being criticized and in the depth of the writer's commitment to the uttered academic conflict, i.e., in the relation between the critic and the criticized. This, in turn, reflects the shift from an author-centered and privately based medicine to a fact-invoking, professionalized, and highly competitive scientific community where visibility' implies survival on the stage of Western academia