Introduction

For a long time, scientific information has reached the general public through the media. This book will question the public's ability to appropriate or to (re)construct scientific knowledge by reading the national and regional daily press. Originally, the media does not set out to transmit scientific knowledge as its primary objective, and we will discuss the role (and the responsibility) of the media in popularizing science in Part One of this book. Nevertheless, we hypothesize that it is difficult to provide information to the reader without also providing a minimum of knowledge1. This poses a major challenge for journalists; they must create high-quality information that is both accessible and intelligible, and which enable the reader to participate - in full knowledge of the facts - in the democratic debate on scientific issues.

In this context, it is important to avoid a simplistic approach to the process of popularizing science or minimizing the complexity of these social practices and technical and semiotic devices2. The paradox inherent in this process is now well established, being both "trivial", because it has existed for a long time, and "complex", mostly because it relies on a set of disciplines, and therefore on a set of perspectives. Because the popularization of science relies on the intersection of communication devices, knowledge and social logic, it is of interest to "hard sciences" (chemistry, physics, biology, agronomy, etc.), as well as to the humanities (information and communication, linguistics, history, etc.). Moreover, since the subjects covered by the media concern both the political world and society, the process is of interest to social sciences as a whole (sociology, economics, law, management, etc.).

In his seminal work Écrire la science, Jeanneret (1994) suggested that the popularization project should be taken very seriously, reminding us of this necessary interdisciplinarity, a principle that is now accepted in all research on this subject3. The extent and development of the field in recent decades can be seen in the numerous workshops, conferences and publications in this area. They also illustrate the wide variety of approaches that are devoted to it, which we will explore in this work4.

Our study follows on from research devoted to the "science-society dialogue" and to the dissemination of scientific information beyond experts. The scientific field at the heart of this research is agroecology, and in particular the protection of plants by natural mechanisms (insects or substances of natural origin, for example). Our objective is to study terminological and cognitive issues when popularizing the processes of biological control (in French and English)5. The analysis of this field is particularly interesting for at least three complementary reasons, which we will outline below.

First, although its denominations and concepts are still not well known to the general public, scientific research on biological control is constantly progressing, and the development of its methods is likely to have a significant societal and environmental impact in the decades to come. Faced with the pressing issue of environmental protection, society is taking up these subjects and - as already noted by Guilbert (1975) - the situation is therefore becoming favorable for the observation of an object of discourse and its evolution.

Second, this field is gaining momentum in the French and international news, as recent regulations (see the law for Agriculture, Food and Forestry6, the Labbé law7, the Ecophyto II governmental plan8, etc.) impose a transition towards more natural methods of plant protection.

Third, the (plant protection) products developed in this field are presented as alternatives to (chemically produced) phytosanitary products (commonly called "pesticides"), which have been disparaged for a long time and are increasingly controversial today. Since the work of Carson (1962), many multidisciplinary studies have been devoted to these controversial products9, as well as to the necessary transition from agrochemistry to agroecology10.

Citizens are therefore likely to have a positive preconception of this field, given that scientific research is seen as being able to propose concrete solutions for the reduction of pollution (in soils, waterways, crops), with positive health benefits11.

On the other hand, agroecology is a complex scientific field that also has controversial aspects, if we look into the processes involved: biological control methods involve human intervention in the natural ecosystem and affect living organisms (macro or micro-organisms). It is therefore likely to evoke other sensitive and widely covered issues that are related to human interference in natural phenomena (genetically modified organisms, cloning, etc.). The way in which these subjects are presented by the media may therefore have an impact on how the citizen understands and perceives the field (in a positive or negative light). Indeed, the capacity of any individual to understand, to accept or to reject scientific progress will largely depend on the way in which it is presented (named, designated, described) in the media, and thus popularized.

This is the central focus of this book. Here, we set out to explore the way in which the field of biological control is presented by the written press, through the general perspective and methods of applied linguistics.

The book is divided into three parts, which will enable us to explore these questions in greater depth. Part 1 is made up of three chapters and sets the overall framework in which we place ourselves, that of the challenge assigned to the media in this dialogue between science and society. We address the multiple forms (and perceptions) of this dialogue, the role and the responsibility of the media in this process, as well as the complex relations between scientific and media methods and perspectives (Chapter 1). These elements are then enriched by a text-based approach, dealing with discourses around science and, in particular, the link between language and the different forms of knowledge that can be conveyed (Chapter 2). This first part concludes with the way we envisage textual data analysis, and the presentation of theoretical and methodological tools that are specific to textual terminology and which constitute an interesting entry point for the study of media discourse (Chapter 3).

Part 2 of this book is devoted to the case study at the heart of this research: the media coverage of the specialized field of biocontrol. After a presentation of scientific methods and products involved, and of the dual French and English corpora selected for this study (Chapter 4), the two following chapters highlight the results of the analysis in context. First, we present the different terms that refer to the same methods and products in this field of specialization, in other words, the competitive denominations throughout press articles (Chapter 5). We then discuss the description of these objects of discourse, through various simplification strategies, for example, the use of a "binary" cognitive procedure pitting the biological against the chemical, as well as the use of reasoning by analogy (Chapter 6). These discursive strategies ensure a clear and accessible dissemination of information to a wide audience but can raise questions and even interpretation difficulties for a non-expert reader.

Part 3 of this book consists of two chapters that look back on issues and challenges related to media coverage in the field of agroecology. The first chapter (Chapter 7) presents a summary of the questions generated by the analysis of media discourse, revealing the linguistic instability that can hinder effective communication. The second and final chapter of this part (Chapter 8) identifies a set of challenges that need to be addressed in order to improve communication in this emerging field, which are related to scientific issues in environmental communication more generally.

NOTE.- This study is being conducted as part of an interdisciplinary research project (BOOST: Bioprotection and Biostimulation of Plants) initiated in 2017 by the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement - INRAE). It is supported by the Université Côte d'Azur (UCA) as part of its structuring research projects and brings together several scientific partners (including the Institut Sophia Agrobiotech (ISA), the Group for Research in Law, Economics and Management (Groupe de recherche en droit, économie et gestion - GREDEG), the URE Transitions (UCA) and the BABEL research laboratory (University of Toulon)12.

Notes

1. 1 We thus follow the principles proposed by other researchers, such as Jeanneret (1994), Véron (1997) or Schiele (2005), for example, who consider that popularizing science requires the dissemination of a minimum amount of scientific knowledge.
2. 2 These terms (social practices, technical and semiotic devices) are borrowed from Le Marec and Babou (2004).
3. 3 In the wake of other seminal works such as Schoenfeld (1980) and Nelkin (1986).
4. 4 Among many references, let us mention for example: the...