Astronomy, Philosophy, Life Sciences and History Texts: Setting the Scene for the Study of Modern Scientific Writing

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to offer a description of four of the existing subcorpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Both the principles of compilation and the sociolinguistic variables considered during the process of text selection will be described. The editorial practice underlying the computerisation of texts, as well as several pilot studies, will also be discussed.

Elastic language in scientific writing: Evidence from the Corpus of English Life of Sciences Texts

“…In this sense, Biber (1993:249) argues that even smaller samples (1,000 words) can be representative enough of their language features but, taking into account that the level of standardisation of the scientific register in these two centuries was lower than it is at present, the compilers have considered that longer samples (10,000 words) can optimally reflect scientific writing at that time (Monaco & Puente-Castelo 2019:49). The material used here represents more than 400,000 words which are evenly distributed across the two centuries: 200,220 for the eighteenth century and 200,085 for the nineteenth century (Crespo & Moskowich 2020).…”

Irma Taavitsainen and Turo Hiltunen (eds.). Late Modern English Medical Texts: Writing medicine in the eighteenth century. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019. Pp. xix + 432. ISBN 9789027203229.

“…The authors of the texts under scrutiny are mostly educated professionals writing for other members of the same epistemic community, but there is also writing for more general audiences. Taavitsainen claims that monographs were the most important channel for communicating new medical knowledge, and this was certainly the case for other scientific disciplines observed during the compilation of other contemporary corpora (Crespo & Moskowich 2020), but she also points out that the first specialized medical journals, plus the first magazine for polite society (as seen in chapter 7), were founded in the 1730s.…”