Abstract

Sponsored by the Argentine Association for the Progress of Sciences, Ciencia e Investigación magazine released its first issue in 1945. In order to circulate the discoveries in the areas of medical and natural sciences, and to instruct on scientific thought, the magazine was introduced as a knowledge disseminating one and attempted to address a general audience. However, during its first publication decade the CEI editors faced two challenges related to scientific communication. On the one hand, they exhibited the conflicts implied in research writing and the typical conditions of the language of science. On the other, they manifested their interest to bestow a discursive style on the magazine which, although simple and oriented to a wide audience, would not corrupt scientific veracity. This paper follows the French approach to discourse analysis, whose purpose is the simultaneous and reciprocal study of the verbal and the socio-institutional dimension of discourses, and analyses the sociolinguistic representations of the language of science and of its dissemination formulated in CEI between 1945-1955, a period - besides - complex for the scientific development in Argentina, characterized by state interventionism in different institutions. To this aim, editorials and articles that address the aforementioned problems have been selected and examined. The results exhibit the discursive complexities of scientific dissemination in an environment unaware of this practice and, consequently, the difficulty of determining a reader profile for the magazine. In general terms, they reveal the importance of the reflection on the language for the development and communication of science.