tense en ai de dutch

Examining present tense conventions in scientificwriting in the light of reader reactions to three

Dutch-authored discussions

Joy Burrough-Boenisch*

Science Editing and Translation, Boeslaan 3, 6703 EN Wageningen, Netherlands

Abstract

In scientific English it is conventional for present tense to signal general truth (scientific

universality); the past tense is then used to report the author’s own research actions andfindings. Both NS and NNS scientific English may, however, depart from the present tenseconvention - for different reasons. Data collected from a reception study in which 45 readers from

eight countries evaluated and annotated the same three Discussion sections written by Dutchbiologists (but not yet corrected by an NS) form the basis for a discussion of these reasons.The NNSs’ competence in English, mother tongue interference and non-anglophone tense

conventions for reporting past events are dealt with. The readers’ responses to the preponderanceof present tense in the texts appeared to be inconsistent. Possible reasons for this are suggestedand the implications of the findings for writers, teachers, editors and reviewers are discussed.# 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd on behalf of The American University.

1. Introduction: tense conventions in scientific English

Scientific English has certain verb tense conventions that in the more prescriptivetextbooks on scientific writing are often presented as ‘‘rules’’, perhaps most suc-cinctly by Day:

1. Established knowledge (previous results) should be given in the present tense.2. Description of methods and results in the current paper should be in the past

tense.3. Presentation (Table 1 shows that. . .) is given in the present tense.4. Attribution (Jones reported that. . .) is given in the past tense. (Day 1995, p.72)

English for Specific Purposes 22 (2003) 5–24

www.elsevier.com/locate/esp

0889-4906/02/$22.00 # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd on behalf of The American University.

PI I : S0889-4906(01 )00049 -7

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +31-317-420283; fax: +31-317-416774.

E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Burrough-Boenisch).

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Day stresses that these ‘‘rules’’ must be adhered to, to prevent readers having dif-ficulty in distinguishing between an author’s own findings and what is accepted sci-entific knowledge or universal truth. Rules 1 and 2 encapsulate a paradigm ofscience writing in English, that past tense signals the specific (the method used andthe results obtained in a given experiment or research project) whereas present tensesignals the universal (that a method is standard, that a statement is irrefutable).

It has been said that in English science writing, ‘‘proper use of tense derives fromscientific ethics’’ (Matthews, Bowen, & Matthews, 1996: p.104). Put simply, thechange of status a piece of information undergoes from being a finding in a parti-cular experiment to a being a tenet of science is accompanied by a tense change. Thefinding is first reported in the past tense in a research article, because at the time ofwriting the results are still research-specific: they have not yet been accepted by thediscourse community and become part of shared scientific knowledge. Used thisway, the past tense is thus a hedging device (Hyland, 1998). But once published in areputable journal (after passing the scrutiny of the journal’s reviewers and editor,the gatekeepers to the dissemination of scientific knowledge to the discourse com-munity), the information becomes part of established scientific knowledge. Hence-forth, other scientists may acknowledge this by referring to it in the present tense.

That NSs of English have to have the tense conventions of scientific Englishinculcated by textbooks and by writing courses indicates that these conventions area cultural construct that aspiring members of the discourse community need tomaster. As Taylor (1989: p.150) notes ‘‘ . . .there are certain conventions about theuse of tenses—especially past and present—in academic writing which are notintuitively obvious’’. NNSs of English who aspire to be members of the internationalacademic discourse community also need to know these conventions, which is whythe writing manuals for such readers take pains to explain the role verb tenses playin academic (scientific) writing. Whereas scientists and editors prescribe tense use inscientific English (e.g. Booth, 1984; Day, 1995; Huth, 1999; Matthews et al., 1996;O’Connor, 1991) Weissberg and Buker (1990) and Swales and Feak (1994) give

Table 1

The readers in the reception study

Country Reviewersa Non-reviewers Total

US 5 1 6

UK 5 3 8

Netherlands 2 3 5

Germany 2 3 5

Sweden 4 0 4

France 3 1 4

Spainb 5 4 9

Japan 2 2 4

Total 28 17 45

a Defined as people who had reviewed at least one English-language article for a scientific journal.b Includes six Catalan speakers.

6 J. Burrough-Boenisch / English for Specific Purposes 22 (2003) 5–24

advice based on analyses (their own or by other applied linguists) of papers pub-lished in a range of scientific disciplines that show that in real life, authors andjournals do not adhere rigidly to the conventions.1 They attribute rhetorical powerto tense deployment, for example:

The differences among. . .tenses are subtle. In general, a move from past topresent perfect and then to present indicates that the research reported isincreasingly close to the writer in some way: close to the writer’s own opinion,close to the writer’s own research, or close to the current state of knowledge(Swales & Feak, 1994: p.184).

The simplistic paradigm of appropriate use of the past and present tenses in sci-entific writing as advocated by Day, and its refinements (as explicated by Swales &Feak, for example), are part of the culture of science in anglophone countries. Theyare inculcated not only by manuals on writing but also by senior members of thescientific community; for example, Dudley-Evans (1991) reports a supervisor chan-ging the tense in drafts of an NS biology PhD thesis. NNSs, however, may haveextra difficulty in deploying tenses correctly; it has been contended (Hinkel, 1997:p.289) that the learning of past tenses in English is particularly complex. Klein (inDietrich, Klein & Nouyau, 1995: p.7) has noted (in the context of learner utterances)that language learners in general consciously avoid tense forms to express tempor-ality, preferring to use other features of discourse, such as temporal adverbs. Giventhe connotation of the present tense in scientific English, however, an avoidancestrategy involving present tense verbs could lead to miscommunication.

Another factor affecting NNS deployment of tenses in their academic and scien-tific writing is the influence of mother tongue. There is scope for the misguidedtransfer of tense meaning, as Hinkel (1997) demonstrated in her study of tense use ofAsian NNSs (Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Indonesian) compared with an NScontrol group (American English) in student essays and Cloze tests. She attributedthe deviation from NS practice to the Asian languages having a different perspectiveon the sense of ‘‘timelessness’’ conveyed by the present tense and linked her findingsto the tense conventions in discourse.

Transfer of tense conventions from the NNS’s native discourse to English is par-ticularly likely to affect present tense use because English differs from Europeanlanguages in its discourse conventions on present tense. The present historic ‘‘isperhaps rather less common in English than in other European languages’’ (Comrie,

1 Note that the conclusions drawn from such research may say more about journal policy on verb tense

than about authors’ preferences. (Even if an author ignores the journal’s ‘‘guidelines to contributors’’, a

copy editor will emend verb tenses to house style.) For example, McCarthy and Carter (1994) found that

all the verbs in the Abstracts of the British Medical Journal were in the past tense, except for the final

sentence, which projects forward to ‘‘future research’’. They note (p.102) that ‘‘The shifts in grammatical

choice are a fundamental feature of the genre, adhered to by all contributors’’ (my italics), apparently

overlooking the role of the BMJ’s copy editors. Yet the BMJ’s editors are committed to standardising

how information is presented in BMJ articles (Doherty & Smith, 1999) and current BMJ house style sti-

pulates structured (i.e. formulaic) Abstracts.

J. Burrough-Boenisch / English for Specific Purposes 22 (2003) 5–24 7

1976: p.73) and its use in EST discourse is perceived as ‘‘too informal’’ (Malcolm:1987, p.38). In French, however, not only is the present historic used widely in his-tory textbooks and journalese (Monville-Burton & Waugh, 1991), it is institutiona-lised in scientific discourse. That the present tense is part of the culture of Frenchscience can be seen from the following reaction to the editor of Annales de Derma-tologie et Venerealogie, who had broken with French convention by instructingauthors to report materials, methods and observations in the past tense (‘‘Materielet methodes—ou observation—a rediger au passe’’).

Alors, pourquoi le passe quand notre souci dans la redaction medicale est d’etreprecis et clair, compris de tous et aisement traduit?. . .Constamment, le present est plus simple, plus bref. . .et surtout, il est plus juste.2

(Delauney, 1998: p.568, my emphasis)

Anglophones might view the phrases I have highlighted in bold as demonstratingquaint francophone linguistic chauvinism, but example 1 shows that this Frenchtense convention can be transferred to English and may slip through into an Eng-lish-language journal in spite of a language corrector (acknowledged by theauthors). The result is miscommunication: the citation appeared under the heading‘‘Mapping the rainfall distribution’’ and describes the procedures the authors fol-lowed in their study; it is not a general description of a standard procedure.

1. The regression models are applied to the 300 reference points that provide foreach of these points a couple of values, Gd(60) and P0(60). The variograms ofthe first four PCs show a minimal range of 6 km, so a sampling every 2 kmshould be sufficient for describing the spatial variability of the relief (in itsgeneral trend). Spline interpolation (Smith and Wessel 1990) of the 300 CP-derived estimates is then carried out to produce the map of the Gumbelparameters. . .(Wotling, Bouvier, & Fritz, 2000: p.96)

2. The reception study

Given the cultural differences in the pragmatics of the present and past tenses inscience mentioned above, it is interesting to examine how NNS scientists cope withthe tense conventions of scientific English and how their peer readers (both NS andNNS) react. A recent (1999) reception study (i.e. a study to find out what a parti-cular category of readers makes of a particular text) has provided an opportunity todo this. The study was intended to reveal whether there would be any consensus onobstacles to comprehension in Dutch scientific English and, if so, how it wouldmanifest; for example, as NSs versus NNSs, or as a difference between arguably

2 So why use the past tense, given our concern in medical editing to be precise and clear, understood by

all and easily translated? . . .The present tense is constantly simpler, more direct, more concise . . .and,

above all, is more accurate.


more critical readers who review articles for English-language scientific journals and‘‘normal’’ (i.e. non-reviewer) readers of such journals. In brief, its features were:

� Three texts: A (1425 words), K (695 words) and R (1150 words), being theDiscussion sections of three research articles on vegetation science. In theDiscussion, an author evaluates and comments on the research results, relat-ing them to the corpus of knowledge. The Discussion is therefore moreargumentative than the Methods or Results sections, in which the emphasis ison reporting (i.e. narration), and hence it is more challenging to write—especially for an NNS. [The Introduction section is similarly challenging, butthe choice fell on the Discussion because a previous study (Burrough-Boe-nisch, 1999) had suggested that Introductions are less important to readers].The test texts were selected in 1998 from manuscripts by first-time clients ofan editing and translation service. The criteria for selection were subjectmatter and Discussion length (<1500 words), not any particular textual fea-ture(s). A and R were to be submitted to journals, K had appeared in apublished PhD thesis. None of the texts had been corrected by an EnglishNS. To provide the readers in the reception study with context, the texts werepresented with their titles and Abstracts.

� The authors were Dutch biologists (vegetation scientists) aged 44, 53, and 46.When I selected the texts I was unaware of their age or their previous pub-lication record (all had previously published in English). The fact that themanuscripts were sent for language revision indicates that the authors (ortheir superiors) recognised that the English was not optimal. However, thesemanuscripts were by no means the worst examples of Dutch scientific EnglishI have encountered since 1976.

� The readers were 45 professional biologists/vegetation scientists from eightcountries, including the UK, the US and (the control group) the Netherlands(see Table 1), who did the study in their spare time. They had been recruitedby letter or e-mail from the reviewer lists of biology or ecology scientificjournals or from university Web sites. Some of these journal reviewers werepersuaded to recruit non-reviewer colleagues.

On recruitment I collected personal data (e.g. age, mother tongue, languages spo-ken or read, whether a reviewer). From these data I know that none of the readers(except the control group from the Netherlands) had any knowledge of Dutch orDutch writing conventions. Except for five of the Spanish group (who had Catalanas mother tongue) all were NSs of the language of their country of residence.

This paper describes some of the data collected from the annotations the readers madeto the texts. The texts were sent stapled together in random order (AKR, ARK, KAR,KRA, RAK, or RKA), and the readers were asked to make changes to ‘‘improve theEnglish and the texts’ effectiveness and appropriateness’’. As my aim was to elicitspontaneous comments and emendations, I took care not to prime readers to look atany specific linguistic or discourse features of the texts. The main features readersresponded to spontaneously were scientific content, verb tense, redundancy, cohesion,


hedging,3 and typographical and grammatical errors. Of these, the most strikingresponse numerically was elicited by the tense use. It was almost invariably triggeredby the simple present tense, which, as Table 2 shows, predominated in the threetexts. In this paper I will therefore focus on this tense. The use of present tense in thethree texts was rarely ungrammatical, as can be seen from Text R (the text with themost present tense verbs), in the Appendix.

3. Results

3.1. The NS and NNS responses to the present tense in the Discussion texts

The readers’ response to the verb tense can be expected to reflect their awarenessof and attitude to tense conventions in scientific English. I expected the reviewers tobe stronger upholders of such conventions than ‘‘normal’’ journal readers. This isbecause as established (i.e. published) scientists, who have been given guidelines onreviewing by one or more journal editors, reviewers read to assess scientific andgenre appropriateness rather than primarily for information (Burrough-Boenisch,1999). ‘‘Native-speakerhood’’ (i.e. whether a reader was NS or NNS) will also havebeen important in this study, in terms of proficiency in English and mother tongueinterference.

Nine of the 45 readers reacted to tense use by writing comments in the margins,sometimes to reinforce emendations. One, a British reader, did so on each text (e.g.in Text K: ‘‘? Was this observed, in which case use past tense, or is it just a statementof logic, in which case use present tense.’’) Of the eight other readers who wrotecomments on tense, three (one American, one British, one German) did so on TextA, one (Spanish) on Text K and four (one American, two British, one French) onText R.

Readers’ emendations of present tense to past tense far outnumbered their emen-dations from past tense to present tense: 295 versus 24. They were almost invariablyto simple past. Only 6% of the 295 emendations were to the present perfect; they

Table 2

Tense use in the three Discussion texts

Text code Present tense verbs Past tense verbs Future tense verbsa

N % N % N %

A 69 64 36 33 3 3

K 41 95 2 5 0 0

R 80 90 7 8 2 2

a All these were modal will with future time reference.

3 Though the use of the simple past tense in research articles is often a hedge (Hyland, 1998) my

‘‘hedging’’ data class referred to other hedging devices.


were made at five points in the texts (four in Text A and one in Text R). Table 3shows the magnitude of the shift from present tense to past tense that the readersachieved collectively. Compiled by counting each verb changed from present to pastby at least one reader, this table shows that accepting all these emended verb tenseswould increase the past tense verbs hugely in Texts K and R and greatly in Text A(the text with the most past tense verbs originally). The table also shows howimplementing all these present to past tense changes would have affected the finalproportions of past tense verbs in the texts: Texts A and R would have ended upwith well over half their verbs in the past tense.

The mean number of present to past changes per text was 4.29 (S.D.=6.94) forthe NSs and 1.24 (S.D. 3.88) for the NNSs. Reviewers averaged 2.79 changes(S.D.=6.14) and non-reviewers 1.20 changes (S.D.=2.91). To ascertain the statis-tical significance, I performed univariate General Linear Model (GLM) analyses onthe present to past tense changes. This analysis also looked for significant interac-tion effects; unless mentioned, none were found. In my first analysis I looked forevidence that knowledge of English and of English tense conventions could havebeen significant in motivating these changes. As fixed factors I therefore used native-speakerhood and reviewer status and—because I was interested in differencesbetween texts—text. The only significant effect was that of native-speakerhood: theNSs (i.e. the American and British readers) were clearly more active in changingpresent to past tense [F (1, 123)=8.973; P=0.003]. To explore this effect further, Irepeated the analysis, substituting reader’s country for native-speakerhood (andtherefore distinguishing between American and British NSs as well as between themother tongues of the NNS). The effect was again very significant [F (7, 90)=2.977,P=0.007] and at this level of analysis, reviewer status became significant [F (1,90)=4.466, P=0.037]. A post hoc analysis (Tukey) revealed no significant differencebetween the American and British NSs but showed that the British NSs differedsignificantly from the German and Spanish readers, who made very few, if any,present to past tense changes.

The finding that reviewer status became significant in the second analysis, whichtook account of reader’s country, suggests that analysing at this level allowed theperformance of the NNS reviewers in the small country groups to emerge asimportant. If the present tense was indeed being used to refer to the author’s specificresearch findings (as is the case in the first 10 sentences of Text R), we may infer thatthese reviewer readers (and the NS reviewers) were trying to uphold the anglophone

Table 3

The shift from present to past tense that would be achieved by implementing all the verb changes made by

the readers

Text code Increase in

past tense verbs

Proportion of past tense verbs

in text if all changes implemented

A 183% 61% (was 33%)

K 950% 44% (was 5%)

R 757% 60% (was 8%)


convention of using the past tense for one’s own research findings. This could explainwhy neither the Dutch readers (expected to share the authors’ tense perceptions) northe French readers (recall the French convention for reporting science in the presenttense) made the fewest tense changes; in both these groups, the reviewers behavedmore internationally than chauvinistically.

3.2. Differences between texts

I was not surprised that the GLM analysis looking at native-speakerhood foundtext to have a significant effect on the present to past changes [F (2, 123)=3.704,P=0.027]. Difference in text length must have been important. But note too that inTexts K and R, 90% or more of the verbs were in the present tense, compared with64% in Text A (Table 2). Another difference was that 20% of Text R’s present tenseverbs were in the passive voice, but Texts A and K had fewer than 5% passive verbs.The histograms of numbers of changes of present to past tense (Fig. 1) indicate thedifferent response patterns to the present tenses in the texts.

Not only were the frequencies of tense changes per reader in the three texts veryskewed, but it can also be seen that even though the tense use in the texts elicitedvigorous spontaneous comments from some readers, the frequency of tense changeswas generally small—much smaller than the potential suggested in Table 3. Fur-thermore, the largest category was ‘‘zero changes’’. Should this zero response beinterpreted as tacit endorsement of the predominance of present tense, or as indi-cating that verbs were not noticed? (Readers may have been too busy emendingother text features.) The presence of eight overt verb errors (five in Text A, three intext K) enabled me to assess readers’ alertness to verbs. Three of the errors were in theparticiple (e.g. ‘‘Although these species can not be compare directly with perennial

Fig 1. Histograms of present to past tense changes.


species. . .’’): two of these were emended by over 50% of the readers. One error(‘‘Comparative studies with respect to plant morphology were often done in shortterm experiments’’) could be of tense (‘‘are often done’’) or aspect (‘‘have often beendone’’). There were four errors of aspect (e.g. ‘‘Still, many national floras are notfully covering the subgenus’’.

The raw data showed that the NSs were most alert to these ‘‘wrong’’ verbs. Uni-variate GLM (fixed factors: native-speakerhood, reviewer status and text) found avery significant effect for native-speakerhood [F (1, 123)=22.535, P=0.000].Reviewer status was not significant. (That text and the interaction between native-speakerhood and text were highly significant is spurious, given the distribution of the‘‘wrong’’ verbs among the texts.) A univariate GLM analysis substituting reader’scountry for native-speakerhood, followed by a post hoc test, showed that though theAmerican and British readers corrected significantly more of the eight ‘‘wrong’’ verbsthan the Germans, the Americans were not as alert as the British readers, who alsocorrected significantly more ‘‘wrong’’ verbs than the French, Spanish and Japanese.

Given the NS dominance in emending ‘‘wrong’’ verbs and arguably inappropriateverb tenses, could the large zero response to present tenses (Fig. 1) have been anNNS response, attributable to lack of competence in English? If it were, the readerswho changed tenses would have responded consistently across all three texts. Theydid not. Only six of the 45 readers made present to past tense changes in all threetexts. In other words, only six readers seemed to have been applying the ‘‘rules’’ oftense use in scientific English consistently. Twelve readers (one American, oneDutch, two Germans, two Swedes, two French, two Spanish and two Japanese,together accounting for 27% of the total readers) made no present to past tensechanges in any of the texts. Lack of proficiency in English does not necessarilyaccount for their behaviour: eight of them (including the American) corrected atleast one ‘‘wrong’’ verb—indeed, the American corrected several. I infer that thereason they did not change the present tenses was because they did not find themincongruous or inappropriate. Only four readers (one German, one French, twoSpanish) made no verb-related changes, i.e. did not correct ‘‘wrong’’ verbs or changetenses. Arguably, these readers were less proficient in English, or did not know thegenre tense conventions, or both.

Another interesting finding is that 27 of the 33 readers who did change present topast tense made no such changes in at least one of the texts.

3.3. Extreme reader behaviour

The tense use in Texts K and R provoked extreme responses from two readers:one British reader, B3, changed 14 present tense verbs to past tense in Text K, and inText R made 39 such changes. He is clearly visible in Fig. 1 as the extreme outlier inthe histograms for Texts K and R (the other outlier, a Japanese (J1) changed 31present tense verbs to past tense in Text R). Expressed as proportions of the presenttense verbs in the text concerned, B3’s tense changes affected 34% of the presenttense verbs in Text K and 49% of the present tense verbs in Text R. This means thathe changed the proportions of past tense verbs in Texts K and R from 5 and 8 to 37


and 52%, respectively. In other words, he achieved a greater rhetorical shift (changingthe status of the information to mark it explicitly as specific to the study) in Text Rthan in Text K. The extreme behaviour of readers B3 and J1 greatly influenced thedata shown in Table 3; if their changes are ignored, the shift from present to pastshown in that table would be much less dramatic.

Note that though B3 and J1 overlapped on 26 of the verbs they changed frompresent to past tense in Text R, there were 19 present tense verbs that only one ofthem changed.

Reader J1 was the reader who made the most present to past tense changes (14) inText A. In that text, reader B3 was not the NS who changed the most present tensesto past; five other British readers surpassed his eight changes.

3.4. Which verbs were changed from present to past tense

Though 95 different verbs were changed from present to past, only 27% werechanged by three or more readers. In Texts K and R the highest frequency of achange from present to past was six, but in Text A there were two present tensehotspots. The first was a present tense embedded in a sentence written in the pasttense. Fifteen readers changed it to past tense; eight of these were NSs. Their motivemay have been to correct the tense inconsistency, but from example 2 (the verb isunderlined) it is clear that an alternative solution would be to emend ‘‘have’’ to ‘‘tohave’’; only three (all NNSs) of the 45 readers did so, and one NS deleted the‘‘have’’.

2. At harvest 4 within the species Holcus and Rumex (from a nutrient rich per-ennial stage) were found to have the highest root fraction and within thegrasses Holcus have the highest specific root length.

The second hotspot, in the phrase ‘‘In this research we examine biomassallocation. . .’’, occurred at the start of the penultimate paragraph. The 18 readerswho changed the tense presumably reacted to the incongruity of referring to com-pleted research in the present tense rather than to an inappropriate claim of uni-versality. Two of the 18 readers opted for a present perfect (‘‘have examined’’ ratherthan a simple past ‘‘examined’’).

4. Discussion of the tense changes

It is clear that the pooled data on present tense changes conceal a wide variety inthe frequency of these changes, in terms of numbers of changes made per reader andper text and also which verbs were changed. To attribute the tense changes recordedin this study to readers’ response to a mismatch between the tense in the text and thegenre convention on tense use is, therefore, to oversimplify. Such a responsewould have produced a much clearer signal, one comparable to that of readersB3 and J1.


Even acknowledging possible reader oversight, the differences in response suggestthat deciding on appropriate tense use in science reporting is very subjective. Thehuge zero response to the present tenses in the texts, plus the fact that any givenpresent tense verb was rarely changed to past by more than three readers, impliesthat most readers accepted the tense use. The exceptions were readers B3 and J1(both reviewers). When asked to explain his response to Text R (49% of presenttense verbs changed to past tense), Reader B3 wrote:

I think the reasons for my changes were based on correcting unconventional userather than errors in grammar. I think this is due to an opinion that results andconclusions from experimental studies are reporting on past events. In thecontext of this paper I believe it is correct to say ‘. . .grasslands are mown at theend of the growing season,’ as this reports ongoing events. However, reportingon your results, for example, ‘both species richness and diversity are stronglycorrelated’, is actually claiming more than you measured. The correlationholds only for the period over which the information was gathered. Though itprobably still holds now, it may not do, and should be reported in the pasttense.It is a long time ago when I was at University (15 years) so I can’t reallyremember if I was taught it or learned it by imitation. I was never taughtdirectly about how to write, but it must have occurred through comments onwritten work. It may even have been drummed into me at school. However, Imust admit that I still sometimes lapse into the present tense, and have to be onmy guard when I revise texts to ensure I am consistent.If pressed on my opinion on the affects of the present tense on the impactof science reporting, I would have to say that it can bias the impact ofwhat is written. The present tense provides a greater immediacy and certaintyto science writing, but at the expense of ‘humbleness’. By that I mean that‘science’ is a collection of hypotheses of various power and consistency, andour goal as scientists is to ‘refute’ these hypotheses if we can. Science is not afield of certainty and reporting it in such terms is counter productive in thelong-term.

Clearly, B3 conscientiously attempted to uphold the genre conventions of tenseuse. Note that in the case of present tense statements in a Discussion being restate-ments of results, as occurred in all three texts, not only in R, it can be argued(Malcolm, 1987: p.38) that the past tense is obligatory, as otherwise the situationsreferred to would be timeless ‘‘or at least omnitemporal’’. But looking at the open-ing of Text R, one could argue that the ‘‘obligation’’ is not merely to comply withgenre convention: perusal of the opening lines shows that the author does notexplicitly say she is reiterating her findings; she puts the onus on the reader to inferthe specificity of her statements. Comrie (1985) has pointed out that when inter-preting a tense, a reader makes use of ‘‘other features of the structure of the sen-tence’’ and ‘‘knowledge of the real world’’. In this case, Author R does not supplyother ‘‘features’’, so the scientist reader uses specialist knowledge, augmented by


information supplied earlier in the text (in this case, in the Abstract, where thefindings were reported in the past tense). Instead of changing tense to remove theambiguity, readers could have made the specificity of the statements overt, byinserting textual clues (e.g. by beginning ‘‘Our results show that in our studyarea. . .’’); none did so.

Previous research has demonstrated the role of textual clues in enabling readers toinfer temporal context. In their reception study using three NNS Introductions ofresearch articles, Chappell and Rodby (1983) demonstrated that time adverbialssend strong signals about the time domain of a tense. Their NS readers judged thatthe most easily comprehensible versions of three texts were those rewritten toinclude explicit time signalling by such adverbials. Significantly for my study, mostof Chappell and Rodby’s readers had no problems with the tense switching in thetexts, whose authors were NNS graduate students. The only readers who showedstrong preference for tense consistency (text versions rewritten in a single tense) werethe teachers of English as a foreign language! We may infer that writers have someleeway in their choice of tenses.

The readers in my study seem to have behaved like the ‘‘non-teacher’’ readers inChappell and Rodby’s study. From textual clues about the temporal context, plustheir knowledge of the science involved, they were able to infer that certain presenttenses in the Discussion texts referred to research-specific results rather than to uni-versal scientific truths. This could explain why for each text the ‘‘zero tense changes’’category contained the most readers. Except for readers B3 and J1, those readerswho did change present tenses to past tense presumably made strategic changes—atpoints in the text where they felt it was necessary to be reminded of the time-boundedness of the information being presented. In this way, the occasional pasttense would function as a ‘‘time framer’’, in the same way as the adverbials Chappelland Rodby used.

One sentence from Text A illustrates the options readers chose when changingsuccessive instances of present tense to past.

3. The fact that they grow faster caused an increased need for nutrients and mayinduce a poorer environment in the pots which results in a functionalresponse in the shoot-to-root ratio.

The nine readers (seven were NSs) who made one or more ‘‘present to past’’changes here did not include B3 or J1. Three (two British, one French) opted fortense consistency, changing all three present tenses to past: three changed the firstand second, one changed the second and third, one changed the second only and onethe third only. Those who emended the ‘‘may’’ did so to the present perfect.

As I did not interview the readers after processing the data, I cannot be certainwhy the NSs emended tense and corrected verbs more actively than the NNSs.However, a study by Vann and Meyer (1984) is relevant here. They reported that USuniversity lecturers asked to assess the acceptability of English written by NNS stu-dents of science or social science put tense errors into the ‘‘least acceptable’’ category oferrors. The latter ‘‘for the most part are global and/or are relatively rare violations


for native speakers’’. Unfortunately, Vann and colleagues do not say whether thelecturers’ perception of tense error was motivated by wrong grammar, or by a per-ceived mismatch with genre conventions.

5. Why the Dutch authors preferred the present tense

That Dutch authors tend to overuse the present tense in English can be inferredfrom the attention paid to this in style manuals written for Dutch learners of English(notably, Hannay & Mackenzie, 1996). Before drawing some general conclusionsfrom the findings presented above, I will briefly discuss the possible reasons for thistense preference in the three texts.

5.1. Authors’ lack of proficiency in English

This reason is unlikely. Each of the authors (all had previously published in Eng-lish) had been learning and using English for over 30 years. Furthermore, togetherthe texts contained only eight verbs that were grammatically or orthographically‘‘wrong’’. The clinching evidence, however, is that the authors used past tense‘‘conventionally’’ in their Abstracts. (Indeed, in Abstracts A and R that tense pre-dominated.)

5.2. Influence of Dutch tense meanings (i.e. semantic transfer)

In Dutch, the onvoltooid tegenwoordig tense [which Sanders et al. (1992, p.107)contend ‘‘may well be the most frequently used of all Dutch tenses’’] is in the form ofa present tense but it also has a continuative use akin to the present perfect tense inEnglish. ‘‘They have lived in London since 1972’’ (which is compatible with theirstill living there) is expressed in Dutch by ‘‘Zij wonen [present tense] al sinds 1972 inLondon’’. Example 4 (from a Dutch-authored research article not used in the recep-tion study) illustrates this transfer:

4. In the Gelderse Vallei the possibilities for restoration of peat grassland areinvestigated in the trial area since 1987.

5.3. Mistranslation/transfer of auxiliaries from Dutch

There is also scope for a Dutch tense form that looks like an English tense form tobe transferred into English. What encourages the transfer is the possibility of form-ing the perfect (voltooide tijd) in Dutch by using the auxiliary zijn (from the verb ‘‘tobe’’) plus the past participle of the verb. When wishing to use a passive construction(these are common in science: see e.g. Matthews et al., 1996; Tarone & Dwyer, 1981)a Dutch author might inadvertently transfer the Dutch third person singular form of theauxiliary (is) into English, where its equivalent is the identical ‘‘is’’. Evidence that thishappens is publicly visible in another genre in Amsterdam Schiphol International


Airport. Here, the official bilingual notices at the entrances to all public toilets fea-ture a clock with adjustable hands and the texts:

5a. DIT TOILET IS GECONTROLEERD OM. . .UURTHIS TOILET IS CHECKED AT. . .O’CLOCK

But the correct English translation should be:

5b. THIS TOILET WAS CHECKED AT. . .O’CLOCK

Errors of this type occurring in Dutch scientific English would signal habitualityor universal scientific truth. When I examined the passive voice present tense verbsin the texts (two in A, one in K and 16 in R), however, I found they were embeddedin passages of present tense and were not associated with dates or other time-bounding devices that would make them incongruous. This makes reason threeunlikely.

5.4. Mistranslation/transfer of auxiliaries from Dutch

This is largely speculative. The present historic is certainly more common inDutch than in English, particularly in historical narratives, including those withinacademic or scientific texts (for examples, see Burrough-Boenisch, 2000). In line withthe convention in Dutch, Dutch NSs asked to take minutes of meetings in Englishwill often do so in the present tense, as shown below, in the first few lines of theEnglish-language minutes of a professorial selection committee, recorded in the presenttense by a Dutch academic. I have underlined the instances of present tense.

6. Minutes of the meeting held in xxxxxxxxx on ** October 1999

1. Opening and welcome

The meeting is opened by the Chairman at 14.05 hours. Present are in alpha-betical order: [A, B, C, D, E]. Absent with notification [F]. There follows ashort round of introduction of the members. . .

It is conceivable that this ‘‘Dutch’’ convention of reporting meeting minutes in thepresent tense was adopted from the French, perhaps during French suzerainty(1795–1806). An intriguing—but highly speculative—possibility is that French hassimilarly influenced the discourse of Dutch scientists; it was the international mod-ern language used by Dutch scientists in the early stages of international scientificcommunication. German (in which the present tense is also less marked than inEnglish) overtook French as the international language of Dutch scientists in thenineteenth century and continued as such until the mid-twentieth century (van Ber-kel, Helden, & Palm, 1999), when it was displaced by English.


Whatever the reasons for Dutch scientists’ preference for the present tense, thisusage will be reinforced within the Dutch scientific and academic discourse com-munity when scientists and academics read draft English-language articles by Dutchcolleagues. Furthermore, as this is not a grammatical error but an error at discourselevel (see James, 1998), it may be overlooked by language correctors, journalreviewers and editors (see example 1).

When questioned on her tense use, Author R, who had used many present tenses(Table 2), of which 20% were present passives, said she had thought that in con-structions such as ‘‘high loam percentage is correlated with higher soil pH’’ she wasusing the perfect tense. Clearly, she was misguidedly transferring Dutch tensemeanings (reason three). She also said that she felt justified in using the present tensefor any of her results that had been shown to be statistically significant, and wouldcertainly do so when writing in Dutch. She had been unaware of the pragmatics ofthe present tense in scientific English.

6. Conclusions, and implications for writing, teaching and editing scientific English

My findings on tense use and readers’ response to it confirm that tense conventions inscientific English can be (and are) ignored. I have suggested some factors that may causeNNSs (specifically, Dutch authors) to apparently ignore the present tense conventions.Because this international study was conducted at long range and relied on the goodwillof busy scientists, many of whom had had to be chivvied into completing the study, I didnot attempt to conduct follow-up interviews to ascertain readers’ motives.

Though some of the readers in my study (generally the NSs) wished to uphold thetense conventions, there was disagreement about which verbs needed to be pasttense to signal research specificity. At first sight, my data suggested that readers’tense changes were motivated by a mismatch with genre convention, but scrutiny ofthe response to the three texts showed that this conclusion is an oversimplification.What motivated a reader to change the tense of a particular verb was often a desireto achieve tense consistency within a sentence or paragraph (a motive that Chappelland Rodby’s, 1983 teacher readers would presumably have applauded). But thetense emendation was very subjective: most of those readers who changed tensesfrom present to past seem to have applied the tense convention selectively, generallyallowing present tense to remain and be implicitly interpreted as referring to thefindings specific to the reported research. This acceptance of a tense mix agrees withthe analyses of English research articles carried out by, among others, Swales (1990).

Given that tense use conventions in English scientific and academic writing are notadhered to slavishly by NSs, it is difficult to be sure about what underlies the waycompetent NNSs handle verb tenses in written scientific English. When writing orreading scientific English, do they rely on their L1 conceptualisation of the tempor-ality signal conveyed by tense? Or do they behave like NSs who use tense gramma-tically but ‘‘unconventionally’’ and yet pass the scrutiny of journal editors andreferees? In scientific English, though writers have leeway to mix tenses and mayflout tense conventions, other aspects of the English should be sound. (For example,


there must be sufficient explicit clues about the timeboundedness of the verbs). Theresponse to Text A suggests that there must not be too much tense mixing within sen-tences and that if a text contains overt verb errors, especially at its beginning, readersare less likely to accept tense use that deviates from the conventions in scientific English.Perhaps they then also interpret tense mixing as indicating learner ineptitude ratherthan as the author attempting to signal stance towards the information being presented.

Clearly, presenting tense use in scientific English as inviolable rules (cf. Day, 1995)oversimplifies actual practice and ignores readers’ abilities to infer meaning fromcontext. However, the easiest way for writers to minimise miscommunication aboutthe generality or specificity of the information being presented, is to keep to thetense conventions in scientific English. This is certainly the safest option for NNSwriters who may be unskilled in deploying other devices to signal the specificity orgenerality of information. To avoid misunderstanding or confusion arising from thesignals conveyed by verb tenses in scientific English, authors, editors and reviewersshould ensure that there are sufficient other contextual clues indicating whetherinformation has a narrow or broad applicability. If this is done, then even ‘‘uncon-ventional’’ present tense use, whether attributable to learner English, or to ignoranceof conventions, or to transfer of conventions from another language, or to a desireto write vividly and forcefully, will not transmit a misleading scientific message.

Acknowledgements

I thank Professors C. de Bot and M. Gerritsen (supervisors), and Dr. F. van derSlik (statistics) of Applied Linguistics, Nijmegen University, and two anonymousreviewers. I am especially grateful to all the readers and authors involved in the study.

Appendix. Text R (the text attracting the most tense changes)

Discussion

In our study area variation in soil substrate determines vegetation composition to alarge extend. The loam percentage is practically zero in the sandy soils where spe-cies-poor heath is the dominant vegetation. Grassland communities prevail on soilswith a higher loam content. Management has been adapted to the soil and vegeta-tion present: the grasslands are mown at the end of the growing season, whereas thedwarf shrub communities are left undisturbed. High loam percentage is correlatedwith higher soil pH, higher calcium concentration and lower aluminium concentra-tion in the soil (Fig. 4). Also the nutrient supply ratios are correlated to loam per-centage. N/P- and N/K ratios are high on the sandy soils and much lower on the siltand clay soils. Both species richness and diversity are strongly correlated to loampercentage. Species richness varies but is relatively high in grassland and low inheath. In this data set, the parent material is the determinant of several measuredparameters including management type. Therefore we first analysed the data set as a


whole but subsequently analysed the two major vegetation types separately. The soilpH is the strongest predictor of species composition of a whole set of interrelatedvariables, including sand, silt, clay, Ca, AI and biomass (Table 1, Fig. 4). In Fig. 1and 2 the effect of decreasing pH on species diversity is clear. We conclude thatincreased acidity of the soil can be the principal cause for the declining speciesrichness in nutrient poor grassland and heathland communities, which is in agree-ment with the results of other studies (Grime, 1979; Houdijk et al., 1993; Roelofs etal., 1996). However we found that nutrient supply ratios also influence the speciescomposition. The effects of the nutrient supply ratio in the vegetation biomass arerather independent of the pH effect (Fig. 4). For species richness the multipleregression results indicate also a significant additional effect of the nutrient supplyratios measured in the vegetation biomass (Table 2). N/P and N/K ratios in phyt-ometer plants are stronger correlated with loam percentage in the soil than theseratios in the vegetation are. Phytometer plants, all of one species, would be expectedto give the most reliable information on soil nutrient availability. Vegetation com-position is stable during a long time but differs between the plots, which can explainthe lower correlation with soil acidity or loam percentage (Fig. 4).

The amount of phosphorus and potassium available to plants is related to soilacidity in podzol soils. For plants the availability of soluble phosphates in the soildecreases below pH 6. Potassium availability decreases with soil pH too, because inpodzol soils soluble potassium is leached more when CEC is low (Bolt & Brugge-wert, 1976). The availability of nitrogen for plants is primarily determined by themineralisation of organic nitrogen in the soil which increases with an increasingamount of soil organic matter and is less affected by soil acidity. The accumulationof soil organic nitrogen is largely determined by the atmospheric deposition. Totalatmospheric deposition of nitrogen, corrected for canopy uptake of ammonium, is30–45 kg/ha/year in comparable heathland sites (Bobbink & Heil, 1993). Nitrogendeposition increases N mineralisation but it may also accelerate soil acidification.Yet nitrogen deposition may increase N supply, but decreases the supply of P and Kand thus, strongly increases N:P and N:K supply ratios. Our results (Fig. 4) supportthe hypothesis that nitrogen deposition has additional negative effects on plant spe-cies diversity in heathlands by inducing high N:P and N:K ratios.

In this data set most plots are located at sites where the N;P ratio of the vegetationexceeds 16 (fig. 1, 2). This indicates that phosphorus is the most important limitingnutrient for vegetation growth (Koerselman and Meuleman, 1996), which is usual inheathland vegetation on podzol soils in the Netherlands (Diemont, 1996). Howeverthe high heterogeneity in soil and vegetation composition of the nature reserve isillustrated by the broad range of N/P ratios in the data set including N/P ratiosindicating nitrogen limitation. Also the variation in N/K ratio in the data set is high.Potassium seems to be a limiting nutrient for vegetation growth in at least part ofthe plots. The aboveground biomass of the vegetation on these nutrient poor soils is atits maximum at intermediate nutrient ratios, indicating that not one single nutrient isstrongly limiting (Fig. 3). Balanced nutrient supply ratios favour plant growth. Also


most of the endangered species are found in vegetation with balanced nutrient supplyratios (Table 4), when more then one nutrient is limiting vegetation growth. Nitrogendeposition will cause an increase in N:P and N:K supply ratios, and is therefore a seriousthreat for the species richness in nutrient poor grassland and heathland communities.The nutrient concentrations and nutrient ratios measured in phytometer plants arestrongly correlated with number of species and diversity (Table 1). The weight ofphytometer plants is strongly correlated with aboveground biomass of the vegeta-tion. In this data set a phytometer appears a good tool to measure the nutrientavailability for vegetation in the soil.Six species in this data set are on the red list or are protected in the Netherlands. Allthese species strongly declined since 1950. Other species in the data set that stronglydeclined after 1950 are Succissapratensis, Euphrasia stricta and Rhynchospora alba(Mennema et al., 1980, 1985; Van der Meijden et al., 1989). All declining species weregrowing in soils with pH exceeding 5 (Table 4). In Dutch heathlands soil pH nowadaysis usually below 5 (Diemont, 1996). Due to the exceptional soil conditions with Ca richloamy layers which maintain relatively high soil pH despite the high deposition ofacidifying compounds, our study area has an almost unique vegetation with many spe-cies that have strongly declined in other areas. Only the common heathland species C.vulgaris and E. tetralix and S. cespitosus are growing in soils with low pH. Even thecommon grass species Molinia caerulea which is growing all over the nature reserve,prefers soil pH above 5.

The N/P ratio measured in individual species can differ considerable of that of the totalvegetation in which they are growing (Table 5). Competition for nutrients may affectthe uptake ratio and some species certainly are better competitors for one or morenutrients (Braakhekke, 1980). Genista anglica (leguminosea) can easily acquire nitrogenby N2 fixation which is shown by an N/P ratio higher than that of the surrounding vege-tation. The N/P ratios in plants of Parnassia palustris, Gentiana pneumonante, Succisapratensis and Rhynchospora alba are lower than those in the whole vegetation. Thesespecies seem to be relatively strong competitors for phosphorus. Specially G. pneu-monante and R. alba were found in vegetation with high N/P ratio.

Summarising, we can conclude that increasing acidification can be seen as the mostimportant threat for all declining species in this data set. Increasing N/P and N/Kratios have additional negative effect on the abundance of endangered species. Fur-ther research will focus on the influence of N/P and N/K ratio on plant growth insome of the declining species.

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After obtaining degrees in geography and from Oxford and McGill universities,Joy Burrough-Boenisch began a career in editing in Australia. Since 1976 she hasworked as a freelance science editor and translator in the Netherlands. She is afounder member and past chair of the Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors.Her PhD thesis Culture and Conventions: Writing and Reading Dutch Scientific Eng-lish will be published in the Netherlands in 2002. Important publications in linguis-tics are Righting English That’s Gone Dutch (Sdu, The Hague, reprinted twice in1999) and ‘‘International reading strategies for IMRD articles’’ (1998) WrittenCommunication 16(3): 296–316.


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