The socio-pragmatic phenomenon of academic conflict (AC) is here addressed from a cross-cultural and diachronic perspective, and is examined by combining a quantitative approach and a qualitative discoursal analysis of its salient rhetorical features in a corpus of Spanish, French and English medical articles published between 1930 and 1995. The speech acts that conveyed AC were recorded in each paper and classified into 2 categories according to their level of commitment (direct author's involvement) or detachment (hedginess and AC responsibility shifting). The quantitative results were analyzed by means of the Chi-square test. Our overall findings indicate that French and Spanish scientists tend to be not only more critical, but also more authoritarian and passionate in the formulation of their AC than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. However, when analyzed diachronically, our results indicate that from the 1990s on, the rhetorical behavior of

This paper investigates the evolution of the linguistic means used by scientists to convey academic conflict in French and English medical discourse. The 185-year span studied (1810–1995) was divided into nine 20-year periods. The rhetorical strategies expressing academic conflicts were recorded in 180 papers and classified as direct or indirect. The results were analyzed using χ2tests. Between 1810 and 1929, no cross-linguistic difference was found in the frequency of either direct or indirect academic conflict. Between 1930 and 1995 direct academic conflict was more frequent in medical French than in medical English (p= .013), and indirect academic conflict more common in medical English than in medical French (p= .0001). Qualitatively speaking, nineteenth-century medical French and medical English academic conflicts were personal, polemical and provocative. Regarding twentieth-century academic conflict, medical French conflicts tend to remain personal and categorical whereas medical English academic dispute is characterized by its politeness and/or the shifting of conflict responsibility onto some inanimate entity. Our study indicates that the intellectual climate in a given scientific discursive community influences the rhetoric of conflict.