Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700–1800: A corpus for analysing eighteenth-century medical English

Taavitsainen, Irma; Hiltunen, Turo; Lehto, Anu; Marttila, Ville; Pahta, Päivi; Ratia, Maura; Suhr, Carla; Tyrkkö, Jukka

doi:10.2478/icame-2014-0007

Cited by 50 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This matter warrants further investigation, especially in longitudinal studies of evidential markers in medical writing beyond the seventeenth century into the eighteenth century. Data from the upcoming Corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700-1800 will be of great value here (Taavitsainen et al 2014). Also in need of further investigation is the discursive use in medical writing of markers of direct observation and inference.…”

Section: Discussion Of Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidentiality in Early Modern English Medical Treatises (1500–1700)

Whitt

2016

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study investigates diachronic trends in the use of evidential markers in Early Modern English medical treatises (1500-1700), with data drawn from the Corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts. The state of medical thought and practice in Early Modern England is discussed, with particular focus on the changing role that Scholasticism played during this period. The nature of evidentiality and types of scholastic vs. non-scholastic evidence are given attention, and quantitative results are outlined. It is shown that as scholastic models of medicine gave way to more empirically-driven approaches, the use of evidential markers indicating direct perceptual and inferential evidence increased drastically, while the use of markers signaling reported information -particularly information mediated by classical authorities -decreased significantly. The results are finally discussed in light of discursive and typological considerations relating to contextual changes accompanying the reference to classical authors as sources of evidence, as well as the notion of "marked" and "unmarked" evidence types.

show abstract

Section: Discussion Of Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidentiality in Early Modern English Medical Treatises (1500–1700)

Whitt

2016

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Such stability is particularly remarkable when contrasted with data from previous centuries investigated in Méndez-Naya and Pahta (2010): their study of medical writing from the late Middle English period to 1700 tracked many changes taking place in the English intensifier system in general, including the remarkable rise of very and the decline of right, full , and well . By contrast, even though we can observe several rhetorical and discourse-pragmatic changes in medical writing in the eighteenth century as a response to major ideological changes and disciplinary advances (Taavitsainen et al 2014), these changes are not reflected in the use of amplifiers very, so , and too in the data.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…Diachronic analysis of frequencies across categories points to stability rather than dramatic change. While this finding is perhaps not entirely unsurprising given the stability of the time period both societally and linguistically, it is nonetheless notable that the major disciplinary and institutional changes in medicine (see Taavitsainen et al 2014) do not seem to have a major impact on this aspect of language use in medical texts. It is of course possible that this conclusion only applies to the three major grammaticalized intensifiers investigated in this study and that by including more intensifier types, and looking specifically into whether any of them emerge as new additions to the repertoire, we would be able to detect changes.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…This is also true of individual historical periods: while scientific and medical writing in Middle and Early Modern English have received attention (Pahta 2006a; Méndez-Naya & Pahta 2010; Hiltunen 2012), the Late Modern English period remains largely unexplored. Yet this specific period is particularly interesting from the perspective of sub-register variation, representing an important transition period both intellectually and textually (Taavitsainen et al 2014). As changes in the communicative contexts were manifested in increasing diversification of sub-registers (Hiltunen & Taavitsainen 2019), it could be expected that this would have influenced the use of intensifiers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Intensification in Eighteenth Century Medical Writing

Hiltunen

2021

Journal of English Linguistics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While intensifiers are primarily associated with informal spoken registers, they serve important interpersonal functions also in more formal registers like academic prose. The use of intensifiers in scientific writing has accordingly been explored in Present-Day English, and previous studies have also investigated diachronic changes in this register in Middle and Early Modern English. However, the Late Modern English period remains largely unexplored, despite the fact that at least in medical writing it represents an important transition period both intellectually and textually. To follow up on the trends and developments established in previous work, this paper explores the patterns of intensification in eighteenth century medical writing using Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT; Taavitsainen et al. 2019), which contains a large collection of texts representing different areas of medicine. While the intensifiers that are selected for study are ubiquitous in the data, their frequency varies considerably between individual texts, and this variation is often linked to the characteristics of individual sub-registers. At the same time, the use of intensifiers in this period is characterized by stability rather than dramatic change, despite ongoing changes in the sociocultural context of medicine. Along with providing a detailed investigation of the frequency of the main intensifiers in different categories of medical writing of the period, the analysis describes their co-selection patterns with particular adjectives.

show abstract

“…TEI XML encoding has become the standard practice adopted in digitally based humanities research for Present-day English corpora and is beginning to be implemented in historical corpus compilation, such as ARCHER, the Helsinki Corpus and the Corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts (see Taavitsainen et al 2014).…”

Section: Xml Taggingmentioning

confidence: 99%