Linking Rhetoric and Methodology in Formal Scientific Writing

Studying the communication patterns of scientists can give us insight into how science actually works. We argue that methodological differences between different scientific fields should lead to recognizable differences in how scientists in these fields use language to communicate with one another. This paper reports on a corpus-based study of peer-reviewed journal articles in paleontology and physical chemistry which used techniques of computational stylistics to compare the rhetorical styles used in the two fields. We found that indeed the two fields are readily distinguishable based on the stylistic character of their articles. As well, the most significant linguistic features of these distinctive styles can be connected directly to differences posited by philosophers of science between ‘historical’ (such as paleontology) and ‘experimental’ (such as physical chemistry) sciences.