Spoken and written modes of scientific discourse : some distinctions between english and french

International audienceThis study proposes a doubly contrastive analysis, comparing the ways English and French scientists distinguish between written and oral modes of communication, when presenting their research in scientific articles and conference presentations. Michael Halliday's seminal 1994 article Spoken and Written Modes of Meaning is used as a point of reference for this study, in which grammatical intricacy and lexical density are explored among other features to investigate differences between spoken and written modes. The results indicate that, despite the use of data which were freely fabricated for the intents of the 1994 study, most of Halliday's claims hold true in our corpus of scientific English. However, there are noticeable variations in the French corpus