Synopses & Reviews
This book traces the development of the scientific journal article as a linguistic genre in terms of its linguistic features. It looks at Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe as the first technical text written in English. Texts by Boyle, Power and Hooke from the late seventeenth century are then considered. This leads to the detailed analysis of a corpus of texts taken from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society covering the period 1700 to 1980. The main linguistic features studied are passive forms, first person pronouns, nominalization, and thematic structure. From the study of these linguistic features emerges a picture of the development of science in which the physical sciences can be distinguished form the biological. The physical sciences are experimental from the beginning of this period, whereas the biological sciences only begin to become so towards the middle of the nineteenth century; until then they are observational. With the turn of the twentieth century the physical sciences adopt mathematical modelling as their major focus, a feature that has not affected the biological sector by the end of the period under study. Thus it is seen that the language is intimately related to the context within which it is produced.
Synopsis
This volume traces the development of the scientific journal article as a linguistic genre in terms of its linguistic features. It looks at Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe as the first technical text written in English. Texts by Boyle, Power and Hooke from the late seventeenth century are then considered. This leads to the detailed analysis of a corpus of texts taken from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society covering the period 1700 to 1980.
Synopsis
This book is one of the first applications of a functional approach to language across time. It first summarizes and evaluates previous studies of the development of scientific language, including Halliday's exploration of this fascinating topic. It then traces the development of scientific writing as a genre, in terms of its linguistic features, from Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe (the first technical text written in English) almost to the present. It goes on to consider texts by major scientists of the late seventeenth century, and then analyses and discusses a corpus of texts taken from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, covering the period 1700 to 1980.
The main linguistic features studied are the use of passive forms, first person pronouns, nominalization, and thematic structure. This brings out the interestingly different patterns of development in the physical and biological sciences. It also highlights previously unnoticed effects, such as the influence of mathematical modelling on texts in the physical sciences - though not, interestingly, the biological sciences - from the late nineteenth century onwards. Thus scientific language - like virtually all language - is intimately related to the context (here the 'field') within which it is produced.