La mise en scène de la surprise dans les écrits scientifiques de sciences humaines

Résumé

Feelings and emotions are rare in scientific writing, but the emotion of surprise is curiously quite present in this genre, with recurring expressions like "Against all expectations", "It is astonishing that" or "surprising results". The present lexico-semantic study of different marks of surprise in a corpus of 344 research articles in human sciences reveals that it is rarely spontaneous, it is borrowing stereotypical phraseologies and it produces effects of textual breaching. This feeling of surprise is not really an emotional communication, but rather an intentional strategy. This strategy allows boosting the scientific demonstration of the results, complementing the factual scientific facts when the peculiarity of an object is highlighted, or assessing peers with a kind of mitigated point of view.