6. CONCLUSIONES GENERALES
6.4 PRÁCTICAS DE GESTIÓN DIRECTIVA QUE PONEN EN ACCIÓN LA
In this part of the chapter, I will return to the three scientific stages distinguished earlier (in 4.3) and relate my results more systematically to each one of them. I will also place medical articles from the cen-turies discussed here, i.e. the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on developmental axes related to each of the three layers:
the cognitive, the social and the societal. Figure 4.1 illustrates the relationship between text and context for medical scientific articles during three centuries.
In the articles from the eighteenth century, e.g. Text 1 cited in part 4.2, we encounter a number of different individuals – the author himself, his colleagues and his patients – and their experiences and judgements are described. The typical article is full of explicit, severe and assured evaluations which concern the object of the study – the illness and method – and also the advocates of the method, its naïve practitioners. In the way the author writes, he places himself fairly obviously towards the left of all three contextual axes in Figure 4.1: he treats individual findings as if they exist per se, he describes himself and his colleagues as isolated researchers and he seems to act within society rather than the scientific community.
Cognitive dimension
Social dimension
Macrosocial dimension
18th century 19th century 20th century
18th century 19th century 20th century
18th century 19th century 20th century
Scientists act within the scientific community Scientists act within
society and academic groupings
Scientists act within society
Isolated researchers Academic groupings
Individual findings Accumulation of findings Theoretical integration
Developed scientific community
Figure 4.1 Text and context during three centuries (Gunnarsson, 2001a: 136)
In the articles from the nineteenth century, e.g. Text 2, the typical author adopts a considerably more analytic attitude to the research of others. The author himself figures as an evaluator. He also expli-citly adduces the opinions of other researchers. The evaluations are of medium severity and the author marks his doubts in different ways.
The author is fair and square in the middle of the contextual axes.
In the articles from the twentieth century (around 1980), e.g. Text 3, the typical author does not express himself in his own voice or explicitly through others. Evaluations take the form of the presen-tation of facts, supported by references to other works. Summaries of the research of others form an integral part of the description of the illness/method. What characterizes this and other articles in the sub-corpus from this period is above all the attitude adopted to facts.
The evaluations are not few in number, but they are weak to medium severe rather than severe and they are presented throughout as less certain − in other words these authors should be placed to the right on the contextual axes.
4.6 Conclusions
Language constructs science in relation to the cognitive layer (the sci-entific content), the societal layer (the scientists’ role in society) and the social layer (relations within the group). This construction process has been in progress since the first doctors tried to establish themselves as medical scientists and it is still continuing. In Sweden this process began in the seventeenth century. However, it was not until the mid-dle of the eighteenth century that Sweden became a national writing community. Before 1740, the language of the learned was Latin, but in the Era of Liberty, from the middle of the eighteenth century, Swedish was gradually accepted as a scientific language, and the construction of medical science and the medical scientific community was related over a long period to the development of the Swedish medical article as a genre. This article has focused on this phase in the Swedish med-ical history, an account which ended in 1985 (cf. Chapter 6).
What has taken place since then is an accelerating Anglicization of the academic writing community in Sweden. English is now used in medicine as the medium for Ph.D. theses, for conference abstracts and papers, and for articles presenting original research (Gunnarsson, 2001b). Läkartidningen, the Swedish medical journal, still exists, but is no longer the prime forum for presentations of new findings. The Swedish medical scientists of today choose to present their research in English in international medical journals. When they write in Läkartidningen, the Swedish journal, they have other aims than to
present original research findings. The Swedish medical scientific community has thus become diglossic, i.e. English is used for certain purposes and Swedish for others. In the Swedish medical journal, art-icles offer surveys and present research relating to basic diseases but it is no longer a journal for the original presentation of new research (Gunnarsson et al., 1995).
A development of the kind described here is not country specific.
The shift from Latin to the national language took place around the same time in most western countries, and the modern extension of English as a scientific language is universal (Ammon, 2001; Carli and Ammon, 2007). The Anglicization of the medical scientific com-munity and the accelerating use of the Internet as a communicative tool has led to intensified globalization and also homogenization of science and scientific language. From a socio-historical perspective this development is most interesting and will certainly in the future lead to important investigations. In Chapter 6, I discuss a study of the Anglicization of the economic scientific community.
Notes
1. A constructionist perspective on the emergence of scientific discourse and text genres are found within the sociology of science tradition (e.g. Knorr-Cetina, 1981, Latour and Woolgar, 1986). Bazerman (1988) studied the rise of modern forms of scientific communication, focusing on the historical emergence of the experimen-tal article. A social constructivist approach in relation to written texts is also found in Bazerman and Paradis (1991) and in Gunnarsson, Linell and Nordberg (1997).
2. Bergius, P. J. (1782), ‘Anmärkningar öfver Fähus-Curen för lungsiktiga’, in Svenska Vetenskapsakademiens Handlingar. Stockholm, pp. 307–318.
3. Collin, J. G. (1842), ‘Underrättelser om Asthma thymicum’, Hygiea, 6, 256–271.
4. Lindström, F. and Schildt, B. (1980), ‘Förenklad behandling av pneumotorax med Heimlich-ventil’, Läkartidningen, 999–1001.
5. The Uppsala LSP corpus, which consists of 360 articles from three disciplines (medicine, technology and economics), is presented in Gunnarsson et al. (1987) and Gunnarsson and Skolander (1991).
6. This chapter draws on an article in Encyclopedia in Language and Linguistics (Gunnarsson, 2005b).
7. In Gunnarsson (1993), this study is presented in more detail.
8. In Gunnarsson (1998), this study is presented in more detail.
9. See Gunnarsson (2001a), for a detailed presentation of the study.
10. Compare Salager-Meyer (1994) and Valle (1999).