The Semiperiphery of Academic Writing

Discourses, Communities and Practices

K. Bennett

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137351197
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

With researchers around the world are under increasing pressure to publish in high-profile international journals, this book explores some of the issues affecting authors on the semiperiphery, who often find themselves torn between conflicting academic cultures and discourses.

Part I

Discourses in Tension

1

The Erosion of Portuguese Historiographic Discourse

Karen Bennett

1.1 Introduction

Traditional Portuguese historiographic discourse is a very different creature from its mainstream English counterpart. Delighting in syntactical complexity, Baroque flourishes and emotivity, it clearly does not subscribe to the empiricist paradigm that underpins most scholarly endeavour in the Anglo-Saxon world, and which has established transparency, objectivity, economy and precision as the cardinal virtues of academic prose. On the contrary, its overt rhetoricity betrays a philosophical affinity to the hermeneutic episteme favoured in much of continental Europe, which, in this domain, has found its most potent form of expression in the work of the Annales school, first developed in France in the 1930s.

Indeed, until the last decades of the 20th century, it was French culture rather than English that exerted the greatest influence upon Portuguese historians, an orientation manifested in these academics’ mobility patterns and publication practices, not to mention the contents of their libraries.¹ However, since the turn of the millennium, there has been a significant shift in the direction and intensity of these knowledge flows. With the inexorable expansion of English as the lingua franca of academia, Portuguese researchers of all disciplines have come under pressure to publish in Anglophone journals rather than in Portuguese, Spanish or French ones, as they used to. In the case of historiography, this has had profound epistemological implications. For one, the traditional discourse now seems to be on the retreat, beaten back by another, that has to all intents and purposes been calqued upon English and therefore transports quite different assumptions and values.

This chapter describes a study designed to chart the changes taking place in Portuguese historiographic discourse over a 15-year period (1998 to 2013), and discusses some of the ideological and epistemological implications of the colonization process that is clearly under way in this discipline.

1.2 Background

A survey of humanities and social science researchers conducted in 2002 and 2008 (Bennett 2010a, 2011a) revealed a clear perception amongst this community of the differences between Portuguese and English scholarly writing in these disciplines. Though attitudes varied as to the relative merits of the two approaches, Portuguese was consistently described as more complex, elaborate and poetic than English, which was seen as clear, precise, objective, concrete and grammatically straightforward.

However, the concept of ‘discourse’ as a circumscribed community-defined subset of language was notably absent from the comments put forward in this survey. Respondents tended to consider these characteristics as inherent properties of the two languages, something that is belied not only by the indisputably rich tradition of literary writing in English, but also by the existence in Portuguese of another academic style that is, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from mainstream English academic discourse (EAD).

In view of this situation, a second study was carried out in 2008 in order to gauge the relative prevalence of the two discourses in Portuguese academic writing (Bennett 2010b, 2011a). A corpus made up of 408 academic texts of different genres and disciplines (1,333,890 words), which had been submitted for translation between 1998 and 2008, was analysed for the presence of particular discourse features not usually considered acceptable in English academic discourse,² and on the basis of this, the texts were graded to indicate their degree of deviation from the EAD norm. It was found that the elaborate poetic style, dubbed the ‘traditional’ discourse, predominated in the humanities and some social sciences (with a ‘postmodern’ variant evident in ‘artier’ subjects such as musicology, architecture, art and literary studies), while the ‘modern’ style, apparently calqued on English, prevailed in the sciences.

Particularly interesting were the number of hybrids found, that is, texts that fell between the traditional and modern camps because they contained features of each. In accordance with previous studies that have charted the influence of English upon other languages (for example, Ammon 2001, Anderman and Rogers 2005, House 2008), this was taken as evidence of discourse change, probably resulting from the cultural reorientation away from French models towards Anglo-Saxon ones in the early years of the 21st century and a concomitant realignment with the empiricist paradigm dominant in the Anglo-Saxon world. Five years after the closure of that initial corpus, it now seems pertinent to see how that assumption bears out, and whether evidence can indeed be found of a shift towards a more Anglicized style of academic writing.

The decision was taken to focus exclusively on the discipline of history because, in the multidisciplinary study, that subcorpus had contained particularly clear-cut and coherent examples of the traditional discourse, as well as a considerable number of hybrid texts. This new study now sought to compare that body of history texts (hereafter referred to as the 2008 Corpus) with a second group submitted for translation since then (the 2013 Corpus) in order to find out, first, if the anticipated shift away from the traditional discourse towards a more modern one has in fact taken place, and second, whether this was having any effect upon the kind of history that was being practised.

1.3 The traditional and modern styles in Portuguese historiography

The 2008 Corpus contained 19 history texts of various academic genres, making up a total of 137,456 words. Of these, over half (52.6 per cent if calculated by text; 66.3 per cent if calculated by word) were classified as examples of the traditional style, while the remainder were hybrids. There were no cases of the modern style – unusually, because in the other humanities and social science disciplines studied at the same time (that is, archaeology, geography, education, geography, law, linguistics, and literary studies), the modern style coexisted alongside traditional and hybrid styles. In the 2013 Corpus, however, there were several examples of the modern style, which may itself be indicative of a discourse shift across the discipline as a whole.

Let us look at each of these discourses in more detail.

1.3.1 The traditional style

The traditional style is so called because it seems, in many respects, to be a direct descendant of the grand style of Classical Rhetoric, widespread throughout Europe prior to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. It is characterized above all by a degree of linguistic complexity not commonly seen in English texts of the same type. The sentences are frequently long (60 to 150 words on average, and often much longer) and highly subordinated, and the main topic is not usually presented in initial position, but instead is deferred, adorned or embedded, often within an interpersonal structure that emphasizes the author/reader relationship. This interpersonal focus is reinforced by the abundant use of first-person verb forms and pronouns (such as the magisterial ‘we’ for authorial self-reference, and various forms of the inclusive ‘we’), as well as by the use of emotive or poetic diction, and literary or rhetorical devices designed to create a particular effect upon the reader.

Another characteristic that distinguishes this discourse from mainstream English history writing is the use of the so-called ‘historical’ tenses (that is, the present and future tenses to refer to events located in the historical past). As this is rarely maintained for very long, but is usually interspersed with conventional past tenses, it would appear to be a device mobilized at particular moments to make descriptive episodes more vivid (as indeed occurs in English in non-scholarly narratives, such as television documentaries or informal first-person accounts).

This chronological blurring is complemented by a similar vagueness with respect to logical relationships. It is common, for example, to find the present participle form (known as the gerúndio in Portuguese) used where English might favour more precise connecting devices, such as temporal, conditional, consequential, concessional or other structures. This generates an ambiguity as to the precise nature of the relationship, in keeping with a phenomenological orientation towards the past.

All of these features together, then, suggest that Portuguese traditional discourse is more akin to literary than to scientific or technical writing. Clarity, precision and economy are clearly not its main objectives; for rather than presenting a series of neutral or objective ‘facts’ about the past, the focus seems to be on the historian’s subjective perception of that remote reality and his/her rhetorical relationship with the text’s readers.³

Perhaps the most representative example of the traditional style in the joint corpus is an article by a canonical figure of Portuguese historiography, Victorino Magalhães Godinho, which was first published in 1968 and then translated into English in 2004 for inclusion in a bilingual volume. With its longue durée perspective on shipping in the Indian Ocean, it appears to be emulating Fernand Braudel’s famous work La Méditerranée (1949) in approach and style.

The extract given below⁴ (Extract 1) consists of a single sentence 93 words long, organized in a way that is quite alien to English, as can be immediately seen by the punctuation. In terms of literary devices, there are inversions for rhetorical effect (‘sem que a sua vida por ele seja penetrada’/‘sem que por ele se aventure’) and poetic effusion (‘mole de terra firme sem respiração marinha’), as well as the use of the present and future tenses to refer to events that occurred in the contextualized completed past. All in all, considerable reformulation was required before this could be rendered acceptably in EAD.

Extract 1: Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, 1968

Enquanto a Europa se desenvolve até a era quatrocentista, à beira do oceano

While Europe develops up to the fourteen hundreds era alongside the ocean

mas sem que a sua vida por ele seja penetrado, e sem que por ele se aventure,

but without its life by it being penetrated and without that across it is ventured,

ao redor do Índico as diferentes populações vão-se interligando pelas vias marítimas

around the Indian Ocean the different populations go interconnecting by sea routes

e as suas economias não dispensam tais conexões longínquas de navegação;

and their economies do not dispense (with) such distant connections of shipping;

o complexo europeu é predominantemente mediterrâneo e não se abre a poente

the European complex is predominantly Mediterranean and does not open to the West,

onde é merely costeiro: a África setentional liga-se ao complexo mediterrâneo,

where it is merely coastal: northern Africa connects to the Mediterranean complex,

a ocidental permanence mole de terra firme sem respiração marinha; em contraste

the western (part) remains a mass of firm land without sea breath; in contrast

o Oriente afro-asiático é oceânico.

the Afro-Asian East is oceanic.

Source: ‘O oceano Índico de 3000 a.C até o século XVII: história do descobrimento, navios, rotas, supremacias’ in Ensaios, Vol. 1. Lisbon.

Extract 2, by another highly respected historian, is from an article that was published in Portuguese in 1998 and submitted for translation in 2006. This is a good example of the kind of syntax that predominates in the traditional style as, in each of these two sentences, the main clause is not only deferred but also constantly interrupted by circumstantial information. In the first, the ‘facts’ are also characteristically embedded in an interpersonal framework (‘este horizonte de expectativas levou a que, desde cedo, se tornasse patente que…’), which has a hedging effect, as well as generating a rhythmically pleasing build-up of suspense.

Extract 2: Fernando Catroga, 1998

Simultaneamente, e no que à chamada Geração de 70 se refere,

Simultaneously, and as far as the so-called ’70s Generation is concerned,

este horizonte de expectativas levou a que, desde cedo, se tornasse patente que,

this horizon of expectations meant that, from early on, it became clear that,

se existiam alguns postulados comuns, as divergências filosóficas e políticas

if there existed some common postulates, the philosophical and political divergences

no seio dos intelectuais mais apostados na democratização do país

in the bosom of the intellectuals most committed to the democratization of the country

eram igualmente significativas. Isto é, se quase todos faziam uma análoga

were equally significant. That is, if almost everyone made an analogous

avaliação decadentista da realidade portuguesa e se a grande maioria defendia

decadentist evaluation of the Portuguese reality and if the great majority defended

a prioridade de se pugnar por uma revolução cultural (intelectual e moral)

the priority of fighting for a cultural (and intellectual and moral) revolution

que seria a condição prioritária para as transformações sociais e políticas subsequentes,

which would be the priority condition for subsequent political and social changes,

as divergências eclodiram no que concerne às legitimações filosófico-históricas,

divergences erupted as regards the philosophical-historical legitimations,

bem como à responsabilização de instituições políticas (como a Monarquia)

as well as the re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Political and Economic Infrastructure of Academic Practice: The ‘Semiperiphery’ as a Category for Social and Linguistic Analysis
• Part I Discourses in Tension
• Part II Communities in Conflict
• Part III Publication Practices
• Conclusion: Combating the Centripetal Pull in Academic Writing
• Bibliography
• Index