A multidimensional analysis of late Modern English scientific texts from the "Coruña Corpus"

Resumen

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute a key period in the development of English as the language of science and the consequent formation of a “scientific English”. Throughout this period each scientific discipline and each genre adopted for their transmission through writing, both with professional and didactic purposes, developed their own particular registers, evolving to the nowadays so-called “scientific register” which, despite presenting certain characteristics common to all sciences, also shows important internal variation. The main aim of this doctoral dissertation is the study of both linguistic variation and change in texts belonging to three scientific disciplines – astronomy, philosophy and life sciences – published by English-speaking authors between 1700 and 1900, and belonging to the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing, an electronic corpus compiled by the MuStE Research Group at the University of A Coruña. The methodology used in this study consists, at a first stage, in the automated retrieval of various lexical and grammatical features from the corpus with the help of concordance programs such as the Coruña Corpus Tool or CQPWeb, and, after an exhaustive manual disambiguation, the recount of their frequencies of appearance in each text. After that, a multivariate statistical technique known as factor analysis is used in order to establish dimensions of variation among the three scientific disciplines and the different genres used within them, and across time. This methodology was first used by Biber (1988) and called Multidimensional Analysis, and has been used in a large number of textual variation studies along the past twenty-seven years.