Scientific discourse

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Scientific discourse Päivi Pahta and Irma Taavitsainen

1.

Introduction

This chapter discusses some key issues in studying the pragmatics of scientific writing in a historical perspective, providing a general overview of earlier research and illustrating a range of approaches and methods that have been used in research to date. We shall begin the chapter by defining the object of enquiry, i.e. the pragmatic angle to scientific writing. In section 3, we address some central aspects of the sociohistorical context, essential in studying the pragmatics of scientific writing. These include the focal concept of science, and the notion of scientific writing itself, which is dependent on our understanding of what science is; these are discussed in section 3.1. Section 3.2 provides a brief outline of the history of Western scientific writing, including the use of various languages as lingua francas and their historical dynamics and power relations, equally important for contextual analysis of scientific writing. Section 3.3 focuses on interactants of the communicative situation in the history of scientific writing, i.e. the readers and writers of scientific texts. Section 4 provides an overview of issues in the data and methods for studying the pragmatics of scientific writing, while section 5 introduces three approaches to the pragmatic analysis of scientific writing from a historical angle, examining it from the perspectives of discourse, genre and rhetoric. In section 6, we present some concluding remarks. The main emphasis in the chapter is on English, but other languages are also addressed. Our focus is on medical writing as it was the spearhead of sciences in many respects and is a key area in pragmatically-oriented research, but we also comment on other branches of science.

2.

The pragmatics of scientific writing

A recent definition of the field states that historical pragmatics “wants to understand the patterns of human interaction (as determined by the conditions of society) of earlier periods, the historical developments of these patterns, and the general principles underlying such developments” (Jucker 2008: 894). Another recent definition emphasises meaning-making practices: “Historical pragmatics focuses on language use in past contexts and examines how meaning is made. It is an empirical branch of linguistic study, with focus on authentic language use of the past” (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 13).

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The broad view of pragmatics and historical pragmatics includes areas that are often regarded as belonging to (historical) sociolinguistics. There is in fact considerable overlap between the fields, as the language-external context is a key element of the analytical frame in both approaches, and, in the context of discourse, social and situational factors are often intertwined. Language attitudes are a case in point: they belong to speakers and hearers, writers and readers; they form a part of the social and situational context and, thus, an integral part of historical pragmatics as well. Several phases and macro-level phenomena in the history of scientific writing lend themselves to pragmatic analysis. An example is the gradual process of the vernacularisation of science, which started in the medieval period (see e.g. Voigts 1984, 1989; Pahta 1998; Taavitsainen and Pahta 2004). The process included a power struggle between Latin and the vernacular and the creation of the new register of scientific writing in European vernacular languages, which are central issues for sociohistorical analysis. The choice between Latin and vernacular contains a pragmatic angle as meaning-making practices are also involved. In such instances, authors express their opinions and seek acceptance of their views in an attempt to create common ground. Such communication constitutes a pragmatic process of negotiating meaning and is thus relevant to the present concerns. The choice of language influences what is said and what is understood: how meaning is made. It is not fully known yet what happened when scientific writing emerged as a new register in a language, i.e. how writers of science coped with the problem of having to communicate abstract ideas in a language that did not have readily available linguistic resources or conventions for presenting abstract ideas and proportions or causal relations. New means had to be created. In addition, when learned texts were transferred into vernacular languages, the genre features at the top of the hierarchy were altered as the vernacular versions of the texts were no longer attached to institutional functions (see e.g. Taavitsainen 2004, 2009a). The creation of scientific terminology in a new language also involves a meaning-making process, and scientific texts provide evidence for a variety of practices in the negotiation of new meanings in the vernacular. These range from the adoption and incorporation of Latin terms in vernacular texts to the use of vernacular words or phrases in transferred, extended meanings to various explicatory practices, such as glossing by near-synonymous words or phrases (see e.g. McConchie 1997; Pahta 2001; Norri 2004; McConchie and Curzan forthcoming). A similar negotiation process is involved in translation strategies in turning syntactic constructions used for expressing complex causal relationships in learned Latin scientific texts into the vernacular (see e.g. Pahta and Carrillo Linares 2006). The main foci of historical-pragmatic studies on scientific writing can be divided into three areas: analysis of discourse forms and discoursal practices; genre analysis with the aim of mapping the developments of genres of writing and their dynamics; and the rhetoric of science, concerned with persuasive and argumen-

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tative strategies employed by writers of scientific texts. In all these approaches, discussed in more detail in section 5, scientific writing is examined as communication between writer and reader – the participants of the communicative situation – both having an active role in the meaning-making process. The audience function is crucial. It is well known that modern scientific discourse varies according to its target audience. For example, a typical research article intended for professional readers with a great deal of shared knowledge has a highly conventionalised macro-structure and is characterised by a high frequency of discipline-specific terms, complex sentences containing subordination, and an impersonal style created by frequent use of passive constructions, extended noun phrases describing nominalised actions and a low frequency of first- and second-person pronouns (see Biber 1988; Swales 1990, 2004; Zethsen and Askehave 2006: 646). Conversely, these are not the predominant linguistic characteristics of magazine articles aimed at the general audience, which are often presented as narratives (see Myers 1990; see also Vihla 1999). Similarly, earlier scientific writings are known to vary according to the target audience. Recent research in the historical-pragmatic vein has shown that the dissemination and appropriation of scientific ideas is related to the layers of readership (Taavitsainen 2005, forthcoming a; Pahta forthcoming b); recently there has been increased interest in these issues by historians of science (see below, Leong and Pennell 2007; Jones forthcoming). Discursive practices and rhetorical devices in texts aimed at a wide readership are known to differ from practices attested in texts targeted at medical professionals in various ways; this is seen, for example, in the use of special terminology and multilingual resources (e.g. Pahta 2004, 2007), in the use of amplifiers as a persuasive device (Pahta 2006) and in knowledge claims in different types of texts (Hiltunen and Tyrkkö forthcoming). Similarly, information structure, including noun phrase patterns and the use of passives in scientific texts also shows variation according to the target audience (e.g. Taavitsainen 1994; Pahta and Taavitsainen 2003; Seoane 2006; Tyrkkö and Hiltunen 2009).

3.

The sociohistorical context

In recent years the notion of “context” has been problematised. It is a rich concept, and involves textual contexts as well as sociohistorical conditions of text production with its societal, situational, historical, ideological and material sides. In historical pragmatics, the notion of context provides a multilayered frame of reference. It includes the narrow linguistic co(n)text, the situation in which the communication takes place, and the broad context of culture. For historical assessments of scientific discourse, the sociohistorical conditions are of primary importance for understanding its special features and, therefore, we also deem it necessary to discuss some contextual preliminaries in the history of science and scientific

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writing in some detail in this chapter. The notion of science, and historical developments in it, is important. Prevailing scientific paradigms are also reflected in scientific writing and are relevant for pragmatic approaches to it. The methods and objects of scientific enquiry, and the organisation and practices of the discourse communities involved in science, have a great impact on the ways in which science is communicated, and, in a diachronic perspective, changes in these will also cause changes in the patterns of writing science. 3.1.

Science and scientific writing

The question of what constitutes science is essential for determining what counts as scientific writing; the notion of science is different in different periods and thus what should be considered under the label also varies from one period to another (see e.g. Weisheipl 1965; Alioto 1987; Crombie 1994; French 2003). A narrow view limits it to modern classifications, but in a historical perspective a broad view is more in line with how people in the past understood science and how it affected their lives (Grmek 1998). Science deals with the consideration of the world and includes knowledge of the order of the world, natural phenomena and the laws that govern human life. This fundamental aspect of culture is reflected in the extant written documents from the medieval and early modern periods, both in literary and non-literary works (Taavitsainen 2000: 378). Modern science draws a strict line between science and pseudo-science, but historically this line is fuzzy.1 Alchemy and astrology are good examples of the changing position of disciplines in the scale from science to pseudo-science, and both have received some scholarly attention. Alchemy, the predecessor of modern chemistry, was a central scientific pursuit in several European courts in the Renaissance, and even later such spearhead scientists as Newton and Boyle are known to have had alchemical interests (see e.g. Crisciani and Pereira 1996; Grund 2004, 2006). Astrology and astronomy were in the Middle Ages regarded as one branch of knowledge, and their separation is a late modern development. In medieval and especially Renaissance science, astronomy and astrology formed a progressive mainstream discipline with practical applications for several walks of life: medicine, politics, trade and all kinds of other activities such as undertaking a job or setting out on a journey. Nativities, i.e. prognostications cast for the future of a child according to the moment of birth, were a standard practice in the upper classes of society. Medical astrology provided the means of defining the correct times for various actions such as taking medicine or undergoing operations. The adherence to astrology was at its strongest in the Renaissance, and the same doctrines, albeit in a stilted form, linger on as a pseudo-science even today, with similar applications (see e.g. Thomas 1971; Taavitsainen 1988). The range of disciplines addressed in studies on the history of scientific writing is wide. Some attention has been paid to writings in natural sciences such as natural

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philosophy, physics and biology, astrology and astronomy, alchemy and chemistry, botany and mathematics, and to writings in religion and the law. The humanities and social sciences have more rarely been an object of interest, with the notable exception of philosophy and rhetoric, and economics has also inspired some studies (e.g. Del Lungo Camiciotti 2005). In pragmatically-oriented research on scientific writing, medicine can be identified as a key area. It has also been a focus of intensive research on primary sources both in manuscripts and early printed material in the past 20 years, and attracted attention in research on various languages applying various theoretical and methodological approaches. The position of medicine among sciences is special because of the relation of theory and practice; this problem occupied learned writers for centuries. Medicine was both a learned university discipline and an occupation involving technical skills. Medical education comprised both general theories and specialist doctrines, but also practical applications through apprenticeship (see e.g. Siraisi 1990; Getz 1998; French 2003). The development of learned genres from the twelfth century onwards took place within an institutional context, with the newly-founded universities as centres of medical learning (Crisciani 2000: 75–78). More practical, non-institutional medical writings are extant in great numbers both in Latin and in vernacular languages. While learned medical texts began to appear in vernacular translations in various parts of Europe, especially from the fifteenth century onwards, more practically-oriented writings like recipe collections and materia medica texts circulated in vernacular languages already during the first millennium (see e.g. Crossgrove, Schleissner and Voigts 1998). These include various types of individual recipes or fragments, but also some relatively comprehensive magico-medical collections of remedies. The most comprehensive of such early collections is the Old English Læceboc, known as the Leechbook of Bald, containing vernacular passages derived from several Latin works; the collection survives in a unique tenth-century manuscript (British Library, Royal 12.D.xvii; see Cameron 1983: 153). Another way of looking at scientific and medical writing is provided by traditions of writing, defined as a continuing series of texts building on one another, with a great deal of intertextuality. Traditions are an underlying factor with several genres within them. Early medical writings can be assigned to three different traditions of writing: learned texts, surgical treatises and the remedybook tradition (Voigts 1984); the division was modified to specialised treatises and surgical texts, both belonging to the learned tradition, and remedybooks and materia medica for the Middle English Medical Texts corpus (see below, Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen 2005). Learned translations of academic and surgical texts were new in the late medieval period, whereas the remedybook tradition is longer and goes back to the tenth/eleventh century in English (Voigts 1984). Yet the above division into three traditions is not always clear because of the lack of knowledge of early authors and their audiences. Remedybooks are a difficult category, as these texts also contain learned materials, which may have come to vernaculars earlier, and most

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extant texts are in fact a product of several chronological layers of borrowing and free adaptation (see e.g. Rand Schmidt 1994; Taavitsainen 2001d; Pahta forthcoming c). 3.2.

Languages of Western science and their dynamics

Scientific writing is one of the areas where communication within a wide discourse community extending over individual language-specific communities has been crucial from early on. Major language shifts have taken place in the domain in the course of history: in the early Middle Ages from Greek via Arabic to Latin; in the transition from the medieval to the early modern period from Latin only into Latin and vernacular; and in the course of the twentieth century increasingly to English only. Latin was the primary language of Western science from the fifth century to the early modern period and beyond. The roots of Western science are in Greek antiquity, and the bulk of scientific writings circulating in the West before and during the Middle Ages goes back to Greek sources. The majority of Greek theoretical science was transmitted to the Latin West through the Islamic world in translations made from Arabic in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries, whereas some more practically-oriented writings were translated directly from Greek into Latin earlier (Siraisi 1990). The complex process of transmission sometimes across several linguistic boundaries in handwritten copies is reflected both in the content and the language of medieval scientific writings in many ways. The process involved successive stages of copying, translating, paraphrasing, commenting, excerpting, assimilating, adapting and conflating. On the one hand, ancient authors were revered and many of the prestigious works of the canon were passed on in word-forword translations. On the other hand, it was also customary to compile new texts by assembling extracts from earlier texts. Italy became the focal point for the formation of the traditions and conventions of Western science and medicine (Siraisi 2001). In medicine, the twelfth century is considered the starting point for a long renaissance, which evolved over four hundred years, eventually resolving a broad range of issues and defining a new science of medicine, which grew out of a range of equally new areas of scholarly investigation (McVaugh and Siraisi 1990: 9). These new ideas were expressed in Latin texts in learned centres like Salerno in the twelfth century. Apart from a few notable vernacular texts and the linguistic influence of the underlying Greek and Arabic sources, the discourse world of early medieval science was monolingual Latin. The situation began to change towards the end of the Middle Ages, when scientific writings first emerged in vernacular languages in various parts of Europe. The process of vernacularisation was gradual. In the late medieval period, the gradual increase in vernacular writing affected various realms of knowledge, so that by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries vernacular texts

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dealing with scientific, medical and technological subjects were becoming increasingly common in Europe (Crossgrove 1998). The earliest substantial body of vernacular scientific texts survives from Anglo-Saxon England, where several translations of scientific and medical texts were made from Latin into English in connection with the educational and social reforms of King Alfred (Abels 1998). Vernacular versions of scientific and medical texts started to appear in greater numbers in the thirteenth century in France and in the fourteenth century in Spain, Portugal, Germany and England (see Crossgrove 1998; Pahta and Taavitsainen 2004). The scope of the vernacularisation process can be illustrated, for example, by a set of three gynaecological treatises written in twelfth-century Salerno, attributed to a woman author named Trota or Trotula. These texts were widely disseminated in Latin throughout Europe and are known in 23 different vernacular versions in eight languages: one Catalan translation, three Dutch, five English, seven French, three German, one Hebrew, one Irish and two Italian (Green 1996a, 1997). In England, Anglo-Norman texts started to appear somewhat earlier than English texts (Hunt 1990). In Scandinavia, the emergence of the vernacular scientific register occurred later: the earliest period of Gunnarsson’s medical corpus of research articles is 1730–1799 (Gunnarsson 1992). Some vernacular texts adapted from the early traditions originally derived from scientific treatises, like “Bauernpraktik” prognostications, e.g. on weather, harvest or thunder, circulated even earlier, e.g. in Finnish on the flyleaves of an early sixteenth-century prayerbook (Taavitsainen 1989). The emergence of the vernacular languages in science created a plurilingual discourse world, where languages existed side by side in a diglossic linguistic situation. The institutional language of science was Latin, whereas vernacular languages became increasingly common in non-institutional contexts. As vernacular languages were not used at the highest institutional level, the practical side became enhanced in them (cf. above). Plurilingualism in the domain of science is reflected, for example, in mixed-language writings. A mixture of languages can be found both in manuscripts and printed books where monolingual treatises in different languages alternate and in individual texts containing passages of varying length in more than one language (see e.g. Voigts 1996; Pahta 2004). The tendency to combine materials in different languages appears to be more prominent in medicine than in other disciplines, although language mixing is also attested, e.g. in astronomical-astrological and alchemical writings of the medieval period (Voigts 1989). As a result of the vernacularisation process, the late medieval period is also important in establishing genre conventions in vernacular writing. As the register was new in vernacular languages, the means to express scientific ideas did not exist and had to be created. Vernacular texts occupied an intermediate position between the world of learning and the more popular attitudes, between ars and vulgus, as demonstrated by the German versions of Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium medicine (orig-

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inal 1305), also translated into Middle English, French, Castilian, Gaelic and Hebrew (Demaitre 1998: 88). Genre conventions of scientific writing in English show a great deal of fluctuation (see below). Features of vernacularisation are likely to be parallel in different languages; research on vernacularisation processes in Romance languages, especially in Catalan,2 shows features where the broad lines of development are largely similar to those in England. In all languages, vernacular medical texts seem to have had a bias toward instruction and practical knowledge, but there is a great deal of variation between individual texts. More theoretical treatises are also found, but they exhibit difficulties in making vernacular languages function in the new prestige register. In the fifteenth century, the scale of medical writing is wide: there are texts with theoretical considerations transferred from the Latin exemplars, but there are reduced adaptations and applications as well. It seems possible to trace the transmission of scientific ideas to various audiences with a detailed comparison of the contents and styles of writing (see below). More definitive conclusions would need more research both on the Latin background and on features of vernacular writing. The processes of vernacularisation continued over several centuries, and different phases have been discerned. The second phase started at the end of the fifteenth century, and continues in the sixteenth. Until the middle of the sixteenth century, and even later, medieval traditions continued in texts circulating in manuscript form. With the arrival of the print medium, some texts were simply committed to print without any modification in substance, but there were some important changes connected with the new medium as well (see Taavitsainen, Jones et al. forthcoming). One change is seen in the fact that anonymous conflated texts began to give way to texts by known contemporary authors, some of them originally written by learned scientists and leading experts of their time. This is partly related to the professionalisation and institutionalisation of the field, which had begun in the medieval period. An example is provided by John Caius, one of the most learned of sixteenth-century physicians, who in addition to several Latin treatises also wrote an English work, dealing with the sweating sickness, for the benefit of the general public (Caius 1552; Nutton 2004). Glimpses of the motivations for language choice can be found in the metatextual genres of prologues and introductions, and sometimes metatextual passages can also be found in the body of scientific and medical texts (discussed e.g. in McConchie 1997; Taavitsainen 2000). On the one hand, translations were inspired by nationalistic feeling and the desire to enhance the status of the vernacular language; on the other hand, they might also have had charitable motivations. Arguments both for and against disseminating scientific knowledge in the vernacular among the uneducated, non-Latinate masses are presented, and the sufficiency and adequacy of English in presenting sophisticated medical content is called into question. For example, in the preface to his vernacular treatise on English sweat, John Caius writes:

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… neuer more to write in the Englishe tongue, partly because the comoditie of that which is so written, passeth not the compasse of Englande, but remaineth enclosed within the seas, and partly because I thought that labours so taken should be halfe loste among them whiche sette not by learnyng. Thirdly for that I thought it beste to auoide the iudgment of the multitude, from whome in maters of learnyng a man shalbe forced to dissente, in disprouyng that whiche th’ey most approue, & approuyng that whiche they moste disalowe. Fourthly for that the common settyng furthe and printing of euery foolishe thyng in englishe, both of phisicke vnperfectly, and other matters vndiscretly diminishe the grace of thynges learned set furth in the same. (Caius 1552: A4r-A4v) ‘ … never again to write in English, partly because the usefulness of a text so written will not extend outside England but remains within the island, and partly because I thought that the pains taken would be half-wasted among the less educated. Thirdly, because I thought it best to avoid the judgement of the masses, with whom a man is forced to disagree in matters of learning, disapproving that which they most approve of, and approving that which they most detest. Fourthly, because the spreading and printing of all foolish things in English, both of medical knowledge imperfectly and other matters indiscreetly, diminishes the grace of things learned expressed in the same [language].’ The emergence of the first scientific journals in the course of the seventeenth century had a great impact both in “nationalising” scientific communication and in the emergence of new genres of scientific writing. The first scientific journals, Le Journal des Sçavans (later published as Le Journal des Savants) and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, founded in 1665 in Paris and London respectively, published from the very beginning research articles, experimental reports, letters and book reviews predominantly in French and English respectively, but also in Latin. Latin retained its position as a language of science for several centuries after the emergence of vernacular languages, serving as the lingua franca of science until the nineteenth century. For example, in England, the majority of medical publications were written in Latin until the end of the seventeenth century (Webster 1979), including the ground-breaking works of William Harvey (French 2004). In Northern Europe and Scandinavia, Latin remained important as the primary language of scientific writing in the eighteenth century. For example, all the landmark publications by Carl Linnaeus, an eighteenth-century Swedish pioneer in botany, were written in Latin. The seeds of the development towards modern global audiences can be discerned in the widening of the world especially in the Royal Society period and the expansion of European empires to other continents. In the early twentieth century, there were rival languages for the lingua franca position in science: French, German and English. German was a very strong candidate before the Second World

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War. German had served as a lingua franca in large parts of Europe for centuries, e.g. in the Baltic area since the Middle Ages, and the names of several scholarly journals and series in many fields are still in German (Taavitsainen 2006a). The rapid development towards the present global discourse community is, however, more recent, with its beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2000), when the global situation started to change in favour of English with the increasing impact of Anglo-American culture. The development towards English only has been extremely rapid in the last decade, and English prevails in medical research writing to the extent that researchers have noticed signs of register narrowing in e.g. Scandinavian languages. The native language is used in communicating scientific results to the wide audience only, while the language of the original publication aimed at the professional community is English (see below, Gunnarsson, Bäcklund and Andersson 1995). 3.3.

Readers and writers of scientific texts

The readers and writers of scientific texts in the broadest sense range wide, comprising professionals and lay persons from various social categories and with different levels of expertise in disciplinary knowledge. For example, in the late medieval period, the potential audience for vernacular medical writings included all those who could read – a heterogeneous group in terms of social status, education and profession. The medical profession included practitioners of varied levels and background: university-educated physicians and surgeons, barber-surgeons, barbers, midwives, itinerant specialists like bonesetters and oculists, herbalists, apothecaries, wisewomen and other mixed groups (see e.g. Taavitsainen 1988; Pahta 1998). They can be roughly divided into clerical and elite practitioners and tradespeople or ordinary practitioners. The basic question of literacy is at the core of the readership of scientific texts in the early periods. For example, in medieval England, estimations of the scope of literacy vary (see Pahta and Taavitsainen 2004). University education guaranteed the most advanced level of literacy, including professional literacy in Latin. Fairly advanced literacy, including the basics of Latin, was probably widespread among both male and female members of the aristocracy. With the growth of urban society, the rise of a middle class, the grammar school system and new professions, practical literacy was gradually spreading outside the upper classes, rarely, however, reaching the lowest social strata. According to a cautious assessment, 30 per cent of the population in the fifteenth century could read, although in the largest urban centres the figure may have been higher (see Keen 1990: 224). Another estimation, taking social, regional and gender variation into account, proposes that 40 per cent of London merchants were literate, while figures for some other groups are 25 per cent for the urban male population, 6–12 per cent for men in general, and for women less than half the rate of men (Graff 1987: 99, 106). In early modern

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England, there were great differences in the literacy rates both socially and geographically between various parts of the country (Jones forthcoming). It has also been stated that the demand for more writing in the vernacular grew with the increasing number of readers, and the growing supply of vernacular texts in turn encouraged more people to learn to read (see Clanchy 1993: 201). Another facet of readership is connected with access to knowledge, involving issues of gender, class, education and community and what was thought desirable and appropriate to offer in the vernacular for wider distribution among different social strata (Wogan-Browne et al. 1999: 322). The choices of rendering learned texts into the vernacular indicate a conscious decision and the desire for more open access to knowledge among professionals who were familiar with these materials in Latin, but the doubts and concerns expressed by writers like John Caius about using the vernacular show that these issues were not simple (see above). Information about the target readership of historical texts can be gained by various methods. The real consumers can be assessed through text external evidence such as library catalogues and wills. Book historical research concerning ownership inscriptions in manuscripts and early printed books can provide some insight into the readers of scientific texts. For example, evidence from research of manuscript codices containing Middle English medical texts indicates that the readership of vernacular medical works in late medieval England was heterogeneous, consisting of both lay readers and medical professionals of various levels. English medical texts are contained in manuscripts known to have been owned e.g. by members of the highest orders of university-trained physicians and by barbersurgeons (see e.g. Green 1992: 56–60; Jasin 1993; Voigts 1995: 250–251; Tavormina 2006). Similarly, information on the readership can be gained from the prefatory materials of scientific writings, even though these statements need to be reviewed critically both against the contents of the treatises themselves and the book historical evidence. For example, the prologue added to a Middle English gynaecological treatise suggests that the work is intended specifically for female readers. The text itself, however, appears to show no signs of being adapted to a female audience and in fact contains contradictory evidence: unlike many other gynaecological treatises circulating at the same time in the vernacular, this text contains passages in Latin, which would have been of little use to the contemporary, largely non-Latinate female audience (Green 1992: 77). Prefatory materials of medical texts often mention that the leading motivation for writing in English was to make medical advice available to “the poor”, to improve their condition by giving them access to useful knowledge about medicines and healing practices (Slack 1979; Getz 1990; WoganBrowne et al. 1999). It has been suggested that inscriptions like this are a mere social and literary convention, but recent scholarship suggests that at least in some cases they can be taken as an indication of the intended readership the author or printer had in mind (Marttila forthcoming).

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Differences according to intended target audience are found even at the earliest stages of scientific writing, with its different layers and traditions. In the earlier literature, language and audience were thought to correlate in scientific writings so that Latin was associated with learned writings for professionals, and vernacular languages with more popular texts for lay audiences. Research has provided evidence that this macro-level distinction does not hold, but the pattern is more complicated (see above). As in present-day scientific writings, the audience design is also reflected in the linguistic and textual characteristics of historical scientific texts in many ways (see section 5 below).

4.

Data and methods for studying the pragmatics of scientific discourse

The data examined in pragmatically-oriented research on scientific writing range from texts originally written by hand and circulating in manuscript form to various types of printed materials. In data issues, traditional philology, including manuscript studies and book historical research, has a great deal to offer historical pragmatics. The first step is to gain knowledge of extant materials, provided by manuscript catalogues and indices of manuscript texts in particular fields of writing for the earlier periods, and short-title and library catalogues for later periods. The bibliographical index of Latin scientific writings by Thorndike and Kibre (1963) is a pioneering effort towards a systematic catalogue of Latin scientific texts circulating in manuscript form. There are also catalogues of texts according to individual domains or disciplines, authors or text traditions. These are illustrated, for instance, by a detailed charting of gynaecological and obstetrical writings of the Trotula tradition in Latin, English and other vernacular languages (Green 1992, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 2001). Some catalogues are language- and period-specific, such as the manual of works of science and information in Middle English by Keiser (1998). New electronic research tools have brought studies on medieval scientific writing to a new phase. Knowledge of the underlying manuscript reality will become easily accessible with the electronic Thorndike and Kibre catalogue (eTK, Voigts 2009). The database Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference by Voigts and Kurtz (2000, 2009) is invaluable in charting the extent of English scientific writing and gives us a good overview of the situation up to c. 1500. Another important data-related prerequisite for sound scholarship on the earliest layers of scientific writing is the availability of reliable editions of the manuscript era. There has been considerable editorial activity in Latin and Greek scientific writings from early on, as insights into the world of top science and scientific discoveries in the early periods can only be gained through texts. Solid basic philological research is, however, still in great demand on materials even in classical languages. Research interest in vernacular materials is more recent, although there

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are some early editions of vernacular texts too, often presented as curiosities or based on individual researchers’ personal interest. For example, in English, the earliest editions of scientific writings are from the nineteenth century, the first edition being Reliquae antiquiae by T. Wright and J. O. Halliwell, in two volumes from 1841–1843. This eclectic collection consists of passages of recipes and remedybook materials, selected for their curiosity, and is followed by a few similar collections published during the late nineteenth century. Some vernacular surgical treatises attracted early attention as well (see Pahta and Taavitsainen 2004). Even today, only a fraction of the vernacular medical texts surviving in medieval manuscripts have been made available for further scholarship, and there is a great demand for basic philological research in all areas of early scientific writing in all languages. The underlying manuscript reality comprises a great deal of unexplored material providing genuine possibilities for new discoveries. In recent years, electronic tools have opened up new possibilities for representing the special characteristics of medieval texts, of which researchers are becoming increasingly aware. These special qualities were first discussed in connection with Old French (Fleischmann 1990): a medieval manuscript text can offer multiple readings (cf. above), sentence boundaries can be fuzzy and scopes of modification vary, the indeterminacy of direct and indirect quotations is well known and the transfer of genre conventions causes additional problems (Pahta 2001; Taavitsainen 2004; see also Kytö in this volume). Unfortunately, sociohistorical background facts are also often deficient in medieval texts, whereas in the early modern period the situation improves. Central to the philological approach is the assumption of linguistic skill and expertise; profound knowledge of language with its sociohistorical background is a prerequisite for successful philological analysis as well as corpus-linguistic analysis. Texts are products of historical contexts that must be recovered in order for the interpreter to negotiate meaning (see Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007). Pragmatic research on the history of scientific writing makes use of a range of methodological approaches. These include both qualitative and quantitative paradigms and their various combinations, and methods that are also used in pragmatic analysis of present-day spoken and written data and in various fields of historical linguistics. In English historical linguistics, corpus linguistics is the prevailing methodology, and it is widely used in analyses of scientific writing as well. Corpora are being compiled and corpus-linguistic methods applied, especially to the study of vernacular scientific writing. There are several projects with slightly different aims, but they have a great deal in common and the field has developed greatly in recent years (see below). Corpus linguistics has made linguistic studies more transparent in the sense that they are replicable. Results can be tested by statistical methods that make conclusions more reliable and objective. Yet there are problems as the datasets must be comprehensive enough to offer sufficient material for statistical assessment – we need electronic corpora to be able to apply corpus-linguistic methods.

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By combining synchronic descriptions of various periods it is possible to achieve an overall view of the diachronic developments. Corpus-linguistic methods offer us a means to achieve facts about the distribution of linguistic and stylistic features. Co-occurrence patterns of linguistic features are important as no feature alone is sufficient to define the style, instead several features work together and make the style of writing “involved” or “detached”, for example, to use Biber’s (1988) terms (see below). Corpus stylistics is an area with exciting new developments. New corpora with new tools for corpus-linguistic assessments can give us more detailed information about developments within the scientific register of writing. There are several corpora containing scientific texts (see also Kytö in this volume). Of the general-purpose corpora, the Helsinki Corpus contains twelve scientific texts of the medieval and early modern periods, mostly of medical writing, but also other branches of science (see Rissanen, Kytö and Palander Collin 1993; and CoRD). ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), a multi-genre corpus of British and American English covering the period 1650–1990, continues the line with medical texts (see e.g. Biber and Finegan 1997; Biber and Clark 2002). An example of a specialised corpus with scientific texts is the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, which contains non-literary tracts and pamphlets (see Schmied and Claridge 1997). Domain-specific corpora are also being compiled. The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, containing a wide range of medical texts from the period 1375–1800, is in compilation by a project on Scientific Thought-styles: The Evolution of English Medical Writing at the University of Helsinki (see below); the first sub-corpus, Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT, 1375–1500), was published in 2005 (Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen 2005) and the second, Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT, 1500–1700), is nearing completion (see also Taavitsainen and Pahta 1997; Taavitsainen, Pahta et al. forthcoming; Taavitsainen and Pahta forthcoming). In recent years, several other corpus compilation projects in scientific writing have been launched. These include the Coruña Corpus, compiled by a project on Multidimensional Corpus-based Studies in English (MUSTE) at the University of A Coruña, and currently consisting of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts on astronomy, with compilation of text collections in philosophy and life sciences in progress (e.g. Moskowich-Spiegel 2007). An international research project with participants from Glasgow, Malaga and Oviedo is aiming to produce electronic editions of the late medieval scientific manuscripts housed in the Hunterian collection at Glasgow University Library and to build an annotated corpus of Middle English Fachprosa based on these editions (Moreno Olalla and Miranda García forthcoming3 ). Scholars in Gran Canaria are actively researching medieval recipes, compiling a Corpus of Early English Recipes and studying the linguistic features of these texts (Alonso-Almeida, Ortega-Barrera and Quintana-Toledo forthcoming).

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In principle, two approaches are possible in analyses making use of corpus methodology: top down or bottom up. Both have been applied to scientific writing. Examples of both approaches are provided by studies of the Scientific Thoughtstyles project (see below), aiming to chart diachronic developments in medical writing in its sociohistorical embedding. In a corpus-based study in search of features that would define the scholastic thought-style in MEMT texts (Taavitsainen and Pahta 1997, 1998), the starting-point was top down, i.e. predefined by earlier research; in this case descriptions of medieval scholastic science by historians of science provided the point of departure. As a defining feature of the scholastic thought-style, histories of science mention logocentricity: knowledge was based on the fact “that someone said so”, i.e. the primary source of scholastic knowledge was the quotative. Another typical aspect was the firm reliance on axioms derived from ancient authorities. The task of the corpus-based pragmatic analysis was to find the linguistic features that would display these characteristics in texts. At this stage, the analysis resorted to the bottom-up method as well, compiling automated word lists of the corpus texts as a basis for selecting features for further analysis. The hypothesis was that we could probe deeper into the style of writing by assessing the following linguistic features: Reliance on authorities > references to them > names of authorities in the word lists (with all spelling variants) > corpus searches Quotative evidence > speech-act verbs of saying (with all spelling variants) > word lists of texts > corpus searches Deontic modality > prescriptive phrases (with all spelling variants) > it is + verb (e.g. it is to wit) > corpus searches The bottom-up method can also serve as a point of departure, combining philological assessment, i.e. careful qualitative reading, with corpus searches. This approach proved useful, for example, in a study on modality (Taavitsainen 2001a), a demanding and elusive category. A small, stratified test corpus was first compiled out of a larger corpus for manual assessment with texts from various genres and traditions, representing the full continuum of medical writing in Late Middle English and Early Modern English. This sub-corpus was studied with the “philological” method to find out what means were used to express modality, and these features were then searched automatically in a larger corpus. The advantage of the bottom-up method is the firm reliance on data, and the results can lead to completely new categorisations. For example, metatextual features in the early periods proved very different from those in the modern period (Taavitsainen 1999, 2006c, forthcoming b).

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Three approaches to studying the pragmatics of scientific writing

Pragmatically-oriented research on the history of scientific writing has mostly focused on the evolution of discourse, genre developments and the rhetoric of science. Several research projects are working on corpus compilation and carrying out corpus-facilitated research. In addition, individual scholars have contributed to our knowledge. Of the languages and fields of science, English medical writing has attracted most attention. The foci of research have been on diachronic developments up to modern times, the vernacularisation processes in the late medieval and early modern periods, and the Royal Society period. Another perspective focuses on the formation of modern conventions of scientific writing. In addition to English, Swedish scientific writing has been assessed in a diachronic perspective, but other languages have not been extensively researched from a pragmatic angle. 5.1.

Discourse approach

Historical discourse analysis investigates discourse features, functions and structure in a diachronic perspective. The field is so closely connected with historical pragmatics that the terms are sometimes used interchangeably (Jucker 2008). Discoursal changes are seen as being on a par with phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic change (Brinton 2001). The discourse approach to the history of scientific writing overlaps with historical stylistics. Here the new methodological avenues offered by corpus linguistics and approaches developed in corpus-based analysis of present-day scientific writing have contributed a great deal to our knowledge of the formation of writing conventions in scientific discourse. Biber’s seminal study applying the multidimensional method of linguistic stylistics to a vast range of texts (1988) has inspired several investigations of the evolution of the register of scientific writing in English. The original assessment, which focused on variation across spoken and written genres of present-day English, provides a good point of comparison for diachronic investigations. Follow-up studies have used the same methodology, but dealt with historical periods and varying selections of registers and genres, e.g. eighteenth-century medical texts in ARCHER have been investigated in more detail (Biber and Clark 2002). The multidimensional approach has been applied to written vs. spoken registers in English: medical writing was first contrasted to drama, and then medicine, science, law and news were compared to one another. The difference was not great in the seventeenth century, but grew considerable in the eighteenth century. The specialist expository registers of medicine and science followed a consistent course towards more literate, more specialised writing that exploits the resources of the written mode in innovative ways, whereas the other registers under scrutiny became consistently more oral (Biber and Finegan 1997: 272–273). Modifications of the method have also been applied to research focusing

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on some key aspects of scientific writing, such as the ways of marking stance, i.e. epistemic or attitudinal comments on propositional information (Biber 2004). This study was based on a statistical investigation of stance devices with the aim of discovering underlying patterns across past centuries; the same model is applied to EMEMT materials of the second half of the sixteenth century (see below). Multidimensional analysis was also used in an extensive book-length diachronic study by Atkinson (1999), examining the development of the scientific register in the period 1675–1995, integrating quantitative corpus linguistics and qualitative analysis of discourse features for a firm sociohistorical anchoring. The study traces the development of the scientific register from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society to modern scientific prose, the beginning of modern statistically-based research articles and to present-day use in the lingua franca position. The book also provides a detailed description of the history of the Royal Society itself as a close-knit discourse community. Another study on modern research traced the evolution of medical prose at 45-year intervals in The Edinburgh Medical Journal from the early eighteenth century to 1985 (Atkinson 1992). The same method was employed in a study on earlier data, extending from the late medieval period to the middle of the sixteenth century (Gonzáles-Alvarez and Peréz-Guerra 1998). In addition, the multidimensional method has been applied by Moessner (2008, 2009a) to a corpus composed of Philosophical Transactions texts and earlier texts from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Her findings place the beginnings of modern conventions of scientific writing to the first half of the seventeenth century; similar conclusions were reached independently by Taavitsainen in a study based on the EMEMT corpus (2009a). Together, the above studies show that considerable changes have taken place in the register of scientific and medical writing during its long history in English. The most important trends can be summed up as follows. Contrary to earlier assumptions (Halliday 1988), late medieval texts favour the passive voice and an impersonal way of writing. There is a wave-like development: the style changes first from more detached to more involved, and then back again (Taavitsainen 1994, 2002). The second conspicuous trend is towards a less narrative mode of writing, and a tendency towards a more abstract style of writing, characterised by extensive nominalisation and complex noun phrase structure, has been verified from the eighteenth century onwards (Biber and Finegan 1997; Atkinson 1999; see also Dorgeloh 2005). A large body of pragmatically-oriented research on scientific discourse has been produced by the project on Scientific Thought-styles at the University of Helsinki, charting the long diachrony of medical writing. The aim of the project is to trace diachronic changes in English medical writing in its sociohistorical embedding, including the changing scientific ideologies. A pilot study on medical and scientific writing in the Helsinki Corpus revealed a development contrary to what had been stated earlier (see above), and it also showed that there was a great deal that we did not know yet (Taavitsainen 1994). The study gave an incentive to de-

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velop an ambitious goal: to investigate the development of medical writing from scholasticism to empiricism and beyond in a sociohistorical framework (Taavitsainen and Pahta 1995). Changes can be conceptualised as changes in scientific thought-styles, and defined as changes in the underlying scientific concepts, objects of enquiry, methods, evaluations and intellectual commitments, which are mediated to us through language (cf. Crombie 1994: 5–6). Styles of thinking and making decisions within any society or culture endure only as long as the underlying commitments and dispositions remain stable. Thus changes in scientific thought-styles are closely connected to the view of science as a dynamic and constant process. There is ample evidence of the dynamics in the history of science, as both the notion of science itself and the methods of enquiry have changed across time and from culture to culture. The project applies both quantitative and qualitative methods, the main focus being on pragmatic analysis of stylistic features and on computer-aided analysis of discourse. Most studies have dealt with vernacularisation of medical writing in the late medieval period (e.g. Taavitsainen et al. 2002; Taavitsainen and Pahta 2004) and the transition to the early modern period (e.g. Taavitsainen 2002, 2009a, 2009b; Taavitsainen and Pahta forthcoming); less attention so far has been devoted to texts and discourses in the late modern period (Pahta forthcoming b). Research to date shows that innovations in discourse styles are mostly found in learned registers and proceed at different paces in different types of writing and, according to the findings of the project, the transition period from medieval to modern discourse styles started earlier and lasted longer than has been stated in the literature. Scientific discourse is an umbrella term. In addition to the lines of research explained above, attention has been paid to the way scientists communicated with one another to deliver opinions, results and findings to their peers. Correspondence was an important reporting practice connected with scientific experiments in seventeenth-century England and Continental Europe (Valle 1999, 2003, 2006; Gotti 2006). The networks extended over geographical and linguistic boundaries as scientists reported on their findings and discussed current issues in letters in Latin and vernacular languages. Correspondence was also published in the Philosophical Transactions written in or translated into English or Latin, the pan-European language of science (cf. above). The central figure in this activity was the German-born Henry Oldenburg, whose editorial filtering practices were influential (Valle 1999; Moessner 2009b). Before the beginnings of modern scientific news, early reports on the newfound continents were written according to the medieval tradition of depicting the edges of the world as marvellous and monstrous. A change to more realistic eye-witness descriptions took place in the latter half of the sixteenth century (Taavitsainen 2009b). The reception of scientific writing has been highlighted in some studies on appropriation. The term refers to the process by which meaning is produced and common cultural sets, such as scientific doctrines, are understood and acted upon. Texts

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have plural uses and are perceived in different ways by different audiences. The scale from learned to “popular” is applicable, though the word “popular” is problematic in itself; here it is defined as a way of using cultural products. In a historical perspective, a difference between learned and popular layers of writing is evident already in the late medieval period. Professional treatises deal with theoretical issues, while texts aimed at heterogeneous lay audiences revert to applications such as prognostications of various sorts (see above, Taavitsainen 2005). The difference in the style of writing is conspicuous in some pertinent features of scholasticism, such as references to a hierarchy of authorities and the specificity of these references. Verse and prose provided different modes of disseminating knowledge, prose being more sophisticated and associated with philosophical tracts in the Middle Ages. Metadiscursive practices also vary according to the target readership (Taavitsainen and Pahta 1998; Taavitsainen 2000, 2006c, forthcoming b). Besides scientific writing in English, Swedish scientific discourse has been studied from a diachronic angle. The FUMS group (Avdelningen för forskning och utbildning i moderna svenska ‘The Unit for Advanced Studies in Modern Swedish’) in Uppsala has developed a model that combines a pragmatic frame with other approaches, and carried out research applying it. The model distinguishes three relevant layers of discourse in the meaning-making process (Näslund 1991; Gunnarsson, Bäcklund and Andersson 1995; Gunnarsson 1997, 2006). The first one is the cognitive layer, the knowledge base of the discipline – its objects of enquiry, facts, methods and tools, the ways in which professionals operating within the field view reality, what constitutes knowledge and how it is constructed. The second is the social layer including activities within the discipline, such as the group identity of professionals, group attitudes and internal power hierarchies. The third layer is the macro-social or societal level that concerns the relationship of the professionals to the society in which they operate, their status and role in the society, and their relationship to other social actors, groups and institutions. The model allows both synchronic and diachronic analysis, and includes a pragmatic frame with the analysis of illocutions in informative, explicative, expressive, argumentative and directive speech acts. The metacommunicative level has also been discussed. Swedish text patterns during the period 1895–1995 have undergone radical changes in each of the studied fieds: economy, medicine and technical sciences (Gunnarsson, Bäcklund and Andersson 1995: 35). The changes are interpreted to reflect changes in society. Applying this model, Gunnarsson (2006, 2009) compares the conventions of medical research articles in Swedish published in scientific journals over three centuries beginning from the eighteenth. The articles were chosen to be maximally comparable, keeping the underlying parameters of author’s education, audience and genre constant. The timeline was divided into six periods. The results are related to sociohistorical contexts in the history of medical science and changes in medical discourse communities. The following tendencies were noticed:

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more “scientific world” – less “external world”; more “experiment” – less social, political and economic “measures”; more “process” and “results” – less “cause” and “phenomenon”; a large proportion of “theme development” – a smaller proportion of “discussion” and “conclusions”; more “informative” and “explicative” illocutions – fewer “expressive” and “directive” illocutions. (Gunnarsson 2009: 64) Multilingual discourse practices in scientific writing have also received some attention, especially in medieval and early modern medical texts. This research provides important insight into the roles and functions of languages in multilingual discourse communities in the domain of science. Within individual multilingual texts, the languages involved often occur with a functional distribution of labour. For example, research on code-switching between Latin and English in early English medical writing has shown that the texts frequently contain Latin segments in three distinct discourse functions. The most prominent function is related to professional discourse, including specialised terminology and references to earlier sources of knowledge. Latin connected with religious discourse tends to occur in medieval remedybooks – a feature reflecting the importance of religion in healing practices of the time. Latin is also frequently used in text-organising functions, including segments signalling the beginnings or closings of texts or textual units, and quotations, where the change of language indicates a transition to another discourse level. In many instances, a switch from one language into another does not seem to have any external discourse function; these code-switches seem rather to stem from the author’s or scribe’s idiolectal habits and may serve more local interpersonal functions. Many switches are multifunctional, serving simultaneously both macro-level social or textual functions and micro-level interpersonal functions (Pahta 2003, 2004, 2007, forthcoming a). Similar findings have also been made in samples of late modern scientific writing (Nurmi and Pahta forthcoming). 5.2.

Genre approach

Work in historical genre and register analysis overlaps with historical stylistics and historical discourse analysis and has mostly been conducted with corpus-linguistic tools or corpus-aided methods (see above). Genres are defined as communicative units (Swales 1990) important in meaning-making practices. In historical genre analysis of scientific writing, a central position is occupied by the creation of genre conventions, changes of genre features over time in response to the needs of the discourse communities, and how authors chose to communicate scientific ideas to various audiences for various purposes, e.g. how they instruct people in making medicine (recipes), healing sicknesses or maintaining health throughout the centuries. Some genres survive in written vernaculars from

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the early periods, e.g. handbooks with practical advice, recipes, prognostications and charms are extant from late Old English. In the late medieval vernacularisation processes, learned Latin genres were transferred into the vernaculars and Latin writing set the model. The original genres were used by a small elite of learned physicians and surgeons. The core genres included commentaries, compilationes ‘compilations’, encyclopaedic treatises, questions-and-answers, pedagogical dialogues, and consilia and practica, which were basically medical case reports (Taavitsainen 2006b). As mentioned above, genre features changed when transferred into the vernacular. Genres are operational tools and constitute dynamic systems, which undergo change and variation. In the course of time, sociocultural needs change and genres change accordingly: old genres become adapted to new functions, new genres are created and genres that have lost their function cease to exist (Taavitsainen 2001b). The development of genres and the formation of genre conventions are crucial in the written communication of science. In the field of medical and scientific writing, a dynamic picture emerges when discourse features and generic developments are assessed in their sociopragmatic setting in relation to their audiences in a diachronic perspective. The genre repertoire of late medieval and early modern medical writing in English has been assessed taking the dynamics of the genre development and the sociohistorical reality into account. In the early modern period, new genres were created at the top, and old learned genres became adapted to new uses. The old patterns continue in writings intended for heterogeneous lay audiences (Taavitsainen 2009a). The history of medical case studies provides another example of the dynamics of generic developments, from a central teaching genre to curiosities and exceptional manifestations of disease, and finally to Internet quizzes in a highly specialised world-wide medical journal (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2000). Typically, studies in historical genre and register analysis aim at inventories of genres and discourse forms, and such studies have been conducted in other registers, like newspaper language, scientific writing and religious discourse (see the respective articles in this volume). One of the best-known diachronic outlines of genres is by Görlach and deals with cookery recipes (overlapping with medical recipes in the early periods), tracing their genre features over more than a thousand years from Old to Present-day English. The tenet is that the basic function and generic features have remained constant throughout the long history of the genre (Görlach 1992: 756). This view has been replaced by a more diversified view of recipes recently (see e.g. Taavitsainen 2001c; Grund 2003, 2006; Alonso-Almeida and Carroll 2004). Although recipes are a well-defined procedural genre, their transmission is extremely complicated. Recipes are found both on their own and embedded within a wide range of texts. Recipes in different traditions of medical writing in Middle English show different degrees of textual standardisation: in remedybooks, recipes follow a standardised format, but in academic and surgical texts they are more varied. The dif-

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ference can be explained by the different functions of recipes in these traditions: in learned treatises they provide illustrations of healing practices, whereas remedybooks served as handbooks for quick reference. The standardised format, with explicit titles and regular structure, serves practical purposes and makes consultation easier (Taavitsainen 2001c). A new way of thinking about genres like recipes is to see them as discourse colonies (Carroll 2003, based on Hoey 2001) or assess them as speech acts with promises of healing (Alonso-Almeida and Cabrera-Abreu 2002. Other pragmatic approaches include a relevance-theory approach to describe the various functions and meanings of discourse markers and conjunctions (Alonso-Almeida 2008). The medical marketplace idea has been extended to the study of the exchange, acquisition and evaluation of medical information in recipe collections in early modern England. The household is viewed as the primary arena of treatment, and the users of medical knowledge are in the forefront, thus bringing this study by medical historians into the realm of historical pragmatics (Leong and Pennell 2007). Herbals belong to the category of remedybooks and materia medica. A corpusbased study on herbals belonging to the medieval medical register analyses the structure of texts in the herbal genre with a prototype approach, revealing which texts are connected intertextually and how herbal knowledge is disseminated through layers of writing (Mäkinen 2006). Herbals are closely linked with recipe collections and regimens of health. More systematic botanical texts started to appear in the early modern period, e.g. Renaissance botanical texts with plant names reveal an underlying taxonomic organisation (Selosse 2005). A comparison between textual strategies of the medieval and early modern periods revealed differences in the use of personal pronouns and imperative forms. A gap between more practical texts like handbooks and learned treatises was also evident. The purpose of writing and the educational level of the target audience explained the differences (Mäkinen 2002). The birth of new genres in the Royal Society period, especially the experimental essay, has received attention (Gotti 2001, 2003, forthcoming; Moessner 2006; see also Atkinson 1992, 1999; Valle 1999; Gross, Harmon and Reddy 2002). A larger survey on EMEMT materials compares the whole repertoire of genres and their features in the latter half of the seventeenth century to one another, with stance-marking features as the point of departure. Interestingly, the book review, a new genre in the Philosophical Transactions, contains the most innovative linguistic features of stance marking (Gray, Biber and Hiltunen forthcoming). 5.3.

Rhetoric of science

The starting point in research on the rhetoric of science is the notion of science as a rhetorical enterprise, and of knowledge as something constructed by rhetorical activity. The approach stems from the intersection of interests in the sociology, his-

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tory and philosophy of science, and relies on a long tradition of classical rhetorical analysis, going back to the ideas of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (see Kuhn [1962] 1996). The focus is on suasion and argumentation – on how scientists persuade, dissuade and argue in the making of knowledge (Harris 1997: xii). Scientific texts are not seen as a transparent means of conveying “pure facts”, but rather as a site exhibiting persuasive structures by which scientific knowledge is constructed. Rhetorically, the creation of knowledge is seen as “a task beginning with self-persuasion and ending with the persuasion of others” (Gross 1990: 3). In research applying rhetorical analysis to historical scientific writings, attention has been paid to the style and arrangement of science, but also the features commonly construed as the discovery of scientific facts and theories (see Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Atkinson 1999; Gross, Harmon and Reddy 2002). From the rhetorical point of view, these discoveries are properly described by the term “invention”, which captures the historically uncertain character of all scientific claims (Gross 1990: 6–7). Thus, several areas of enquiry, in addition to style and arrangement, can be discerned in rhetorical analysis of science, including logos, ethos and pathos. Analysis of logos examines, for example, the objects of enquiry in science, definitions of concepts and the nature of scientific proof, including the uses of analogy and logic in scholarly argument. Research on ethos focuses on the persuasive effects of scientific authority and credibility, while examination of pathos is concerned with the emotional appeal in the social interactions of which science is the product (Gross 1990). Examples of topics examined in this paradigm include the use of analogy as scientific proof in seventeenth-century mathematics, taxonomic language in Darwin’s Origin of Species and revolutionary model building by Copernicus (Gross 1990). Controversies can be discerned as an area of special interest in rhetorical analysis of science. An early example is provided by Bazerman (1988), who studied the emergence of literary and social forms in experimental reports in the Philosophical Transactions in the period 1665–1800. The analysis shows that the meaning of the notion “experiment” changed over time, as the reported events identified as experiments changed during the period examined and experiments gained an argumentative function. According to the study, the definition of experiment moved from any made or done thing to an intentional investigation, to a test of a theory and finally to a proof of, or evidence for, a claim (Bazerman 1988: 65–66). At the same time, experiments acquired debate-solving argumentative functions in controversies, becoming subordinated to the conclusions the authors had reached. More recently, controversies have been discussed in the frame of their generic background and discourse types (Bax 2009). In the early modern period, religious and other controversies were debated in the new medium of pamphlets (see Fritz in this volume). One of the medical conflicts in this period dealt with tobacco, a product imported into Europe from the New World. Interpersonal argumentation strategies and intertextual links between texts in dialogue with each other show how the con-

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troversy developed, in what order and how the texts responded to previous arguments (Ratia 2005, 2006). The linguistic means to express controversiality and conflict in academic medical discourse in French and English 1810–1995 were studied by Salager Meyer and Zambrano (2001), recording and comparing the direct and indirect rhetorical strategies in 180 papers in a cross-linguistic analysis. The results showed no differences between strategies adopted in the two languages between 1810 and 1929, but between 1930 and 1995 direct academic conflict was more frequent in medical French than in medical English. Medical conflicts were personal, polemical and provocative in the nineteenth century in both languages. French conflicts remained so in the twentieth century, whereas academic medical dispute in English became more polite, often shifting the responsibility to some inanimate entity. Explanations for the differences were sought in the intellectual climates and the scientific discursive communities. In a later article, Salager Meyer (2005) developed the same theme of medical conflicts but broadened the comparison to also include Spanish. The results confirmed the previous study, but showed that Spanish criticism started adopting the more polite tone of Anglo-American scientific writing in the twentieth century. As an explanation, medical criticism was interpreted to reflect the “evolution of increasingly competitive, collegial and pragmatic end-ofthe-twentieth-century scientific research” (2005: 144). Finally, evaluation has been studied in a rhetorical frame in Swedish medical writing over three centuries, making use of a socio-semantic analytical grid including the medical case in focus, the scientist’s own work and the work of other scientists (Gunnarsson 2001). The study discussed evaluation along the axis of directness vs. indirectness, i.e. whether it was expressed through the author’s own voice or indirectly through facts and the voices of others. The choice between these alternative ways of expressing evaluation was noticed as depending on the positions of scientists and their scientific community, the stage of medical community and the role of medical scientists in society. The diachronic trend in expressing evaluation was towards more moderate evaluation, more embedded in hedgings of various kinds.

6.

Conclusion

The overview we have provided in this chapter shows that historical pragmatics of scientific writing is a dynamic and rapidly growing area of research with scope for more investigation and new discoveries. Pragmatic approaches are gaining ground in analyses of the history of scientific writing and new avenues are being opened up; but there is scope for a great deal more, both in synchronic studies examining scientific texts in particular past periods and in diachronic research investigating long lines of development. Even in English scientific writing, which has been a

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focus area in research to date, our knowledge of pragmatic conventions and meaning-making practices is far from complete in any historical period, and in some periods pragmatically-oriented research is lacking completely. For other languages, a considerable body of knowledge has accumulated since the early 1990s in research on Swedish scientific writing, with the development of a model combining pragmatic, sociolinguistic and discourse approaches. The formation of writing conventions in French and Spanish scientific writing has also been illuminated, with a spotlight on controversies, for instance. Other languages have received less attention so far. Of the three main approaches discussed above (discourse, genre and rhetoric), stylistic co-occurrence features have received most attention, and corpus-linguistic methods prevail. These studies have given us a great deal of new knowledge about the characteristics of scientific writing as compared with other registers of writing. But even within genre and discourse studies, the scope can widen with new points of departure. On the one hand, interdisciplinary approaches with cross-fertilisation of language analysis and cultural history or the history of science provide fresh angles, where past practices of language use gain a firm sociohistorical anchoring. On the other hand, a wider scope of pragmatic theories as the point of departure for analysis can yield new insights into the research area. First steps in these directions have already been taken, but on the whole such studies are still rare and a great deal of developing is needed here. For example, pragmatic applications of corpus-linguistic methodology present a challenge for future research, but with new corpora already compiled or underway we can expect more activity and new insights in this area. Thus, we would like to conclude that research on the pragmatics of historical scientific writing in all languages is a desideratum in order to gain insight into the development of a key area of human communication, a prestige register, responsible for the construction of knowledge on which our understanding of the world around us so profoundly rests.

Notes 1 The criterion posed by Crombie, a historian of science, catches the distinction and serves as a useful point of departure: one of the prerequisites for science is that it is constantly changing; if it ceases to change, it ceases to be science (Crombie 1994, 1995). 2 For research in Catalan, see the homepage of Sciència.cat research team at http://www.sciencia.cat. 3 See also the homepage of the project at http://hunter.filosofia.uma.es/manuscripts.

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