Tabs navigation
Book
The Development of Scientific Writing
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 con... Read more
Published: 2007
Pages: 230
eBook: 9781845533168
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.
| Cover | Cover | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Contents | v | ||
| Author’s note | vii | ||
| Introduction | 1 | ||
| Diachronic study of scientific text | 1 | ||
| Systemic Functional Linguistics – a suitable framework | 4 | ||
| Thematic structure | 10 | ||
| Grammatical metaphor | 13 | ||
| Michael Halliday | 15 | ||
| This study | 19 | ||
| Part 1 | 21 | ||
| Chapter 1 | 23 | ||
| Where it all began | 23 | ||
| The passive | 25 | ||
| Personal pronouns | 28 | ||
| Nominalisation | 31 | ||
| Chapter 2 | 37 | ||
| A troubled period | 37 | ||
| Francis Bacon | 39 | ||
| Robert Boyle | 44 | ||
| Henry Power and Robert Hooke | 49 | ||
| Experimental and descriptive sciences | 51 | ||
| Chapter 3 | 53 | ||
| The place of the Royal Society and its Philosophical Transactions | 53 | ||
| Newton | 56 | ||
| Newton and the influence of Latin | 59 | ||
| Newton and Huygens | 63 | ||
| Part 2 | 77 | ||
| Chapter 4 | 79 | ||
| Two centuries of increasing nominalisation | 79 | ||
| The corpus | 82 | ||
| Chapter 5 | 99 | ||
| Increasing use of passives | 99 | ||
| Passives and process types | 101 | ||
| Chapter 6 | 113 | ||
| A rare phenomenon | 113 | ||
| The eighteenth century situation | 114 | ||
| Continuation in the nineteenth century | 117 | ||
| The twentieth century: a radical change | 120 | ||
| Chapter 7 | 123 | ||
| Nominalising processes | 123 | ||
| Experiment | 130 | ||
| Nominalized processes as Modifiers | 132 | ||
| Chapter 8 | 139 | ||
| Motivation for the passive | 139 | ||
| The grammatical functions of topical themes | 140 | ||
| Textual Themes | 145 | ||
| Interpersonal Themes | 147 | ||
| Thematic progression | 152 | ||
| Chapter 9 | 159 | ||
| A typology of Themes | 159 | ||
| Minor types of Theme | 162 | ||
| Features of the experiment | 167 | ||
| The human element | 170 | ||
| Textual reference | 173 | ||
| Mathematics | 175 | ||
| An Interpersonal coda | 179 | ||
| Ancients and Moderns | 179 | ||
| Epistolary framing | 180 | ||
| Praise | 181 | ||
| Criticism | 182 | ||
| Community | 185 | ||
| Provenance | 187 | ||
| Referencing | 189 | ||
| Changing patterns of referring | 192 | ||
| By way of conclusion | 195 | ||
| The story so far | 195 | ||
| Envoi | 198 | ||
| Notes | 201 | ||
| Appendix 1 | 203 | ||
| Appendix 2 | 205 | ||
| References | 207 | ||
| Author Index | 215 | ||
| Subject Index | 217 |