This paper provides an overview of the Corpus of History English Texts, one of the component parts of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (Moskowich and Crespo 2012), looking in particular at the communicative formats that it contains. Among the defining characteristics of the Coruña Corpus are that it is diachronic in nature, and that it can be considered either as a single-or multi-genre corpus, according to the theoretical tenets adopted (Kytö 2010; McEnery and Hardie 2013). The corpus has been designed as a tool for the study of language change in English scientific writing in general, and more specifically in the different scientific disciplines which have been sampled in each subcorpus. All the texts compiled were published between 1700 and 1900, thus offering a thorough view of late Modern English scientific discourse, a period often neglected in English historical studies (De Smet 2005). The analysis of this variety of English is also useful as a means of achieving a clear and detailed description of the origins of English as "the language of science".

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This paper explores the use of linguistic features characteristic of impersonal or personal style in scientific writing by female authors in the eighteenth century. Variables such as discipline, subject-matter and genre are used to assess the ways in which abstract thought and argumentation are expressed by women, given that, even when these works were accepted by the scientific establishment, such modes of expression were more typical of men and men's writing in the context of the Modern Age. Data from different genres and disciplines (History, Philosophy, Astronomy and Life Sciences) will be used in order to obtain more reliable findings.

This paper complements previous research into the late Modern English scientific writing uses of the adverbs possibly and perhaps as manifestations of either subjectivity or intersubjectivity, as presented in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. In order to have a better understanding of the uses of these adverbs as markers of tentativeness, we will explore their syntagmatic relations with modal verbs. It is widely assumed that scientific discourse has an objective nature, although it has been questioned by its use of hedging and other expressions of stance. In the present study, we will assess how modal verbs accompanying these stance adverbs modulate the expression of tentativeness. The use of stance adverbs shows authorial presence and a covert interaction with the reader. The paper examines different degrees of hesitancy depending on the type of modal verb accompanying these adverbs. The analysis has been carried out on four subcorpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Our findings will be presented from a more general to a more detailed account for each of the forms under investigation and interpreted taking into account the variables ‘date of publication’ and ‘genre’ for the text, and ‘sex’ for the author.