At close rangeprefaces and other text types in the "Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing"

  1. Crespo, Begoña
  2. Moskowich, Isabel
Revista:
LFE: revista de lenguas para fines específicos

ISSN: 1133-1127

Año de publicación: 2016

Volumen: 22

Número: 1

Páginas: 213-237

Tipo: Artículo

Otras publicaciones en: LFE: revista de lenguas para fines específicos

Resumen

What we nowadays term “front matter” was conceived of in the past as a direct address to the reader. Over time, standard formulae were developed and certain rhetorical devices consolidated. Despite the evolution in the style used for the transmission of scientific knowledge, late modern authors were familiar with the highly conventionalised patterns of prefaces and dedications and left any traces of “discursive freedom” for their scientific works. This paper revolves around the either parallel or divergent development of prefaces to scientific works and the body of the texts themselves. For this we have analysed samples written by women between 1700 and 1900 in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The study of some linguistic elements generally admitted to express or denote involvement have rendered a decline in the use of involvement features but opposite frequency of use of the same features in both prefaces and actual works. Unexpectedly, the overall frequency of these features is higher in the texts than in their corresponding prefaces.

Referencias bibliográficas

  • Argamon, S; Koppel, M; Fine, J. and Shimoni, A. (2003). Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts. Text and Talk 23 (3), 321-346.
  • Atkinson, D. (1996). The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1675-1975: A sociohistorical discourse analysis. Language in Society, 25, 333-371.
  • Atkinson, D. (1999). Scientific discourse in sociohistorical context: The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 1675-1975. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  • Bazerman, Ch. (1988). Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
  • Besnier, N. (1994). Involvement in linguistic practice: An Ethnographic Appraisal. Journal of Pragmatics, 22, 279-299.
  • Biber, D. (1988). Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Biber, Douglas. (2001). Dimensions of variation among eighteenth-century speech-based and written registers. In D. Biber and S. Conrad (Eds.), Variation in English: Multi-Dimensional Studies, (pp. 200–214). Essex: Pearson Education.
  • Bradbury-Jones, C; Irvine, F. and Sambrook, S. (2007). Unity and Detachment: A Discourse Analysis of Doctoral Supervision. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 6(4), 81-96.
  • Craig, H. (Ed.) (1916). History of the Royal Society. http://www.bartleby.com/209/587.html [03/05/2015]
  • Crespo, B. and Moskowich, I. (2010). CETA in the Context of the Coruña Corpus. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 25(2). 153.164.
  • Crespo, B. (2015). Women writing science in the eighteenth century: a preliminary approach to their language in use. Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies. 24(2), 103-114.
  • Daston, L. and Galison, P. (1992). The Image of Objectivity. Representations, 40, 81-128.
  • Dickerson, F.C. (2009). The Way We Write is All Wrong. A Profile of and Prescription for Fixing The Broken Discourse of Fund Raising. Unpublished Dissertation. http://hightouchgreetings. com/uploads/The_Way_We_Write_is_All_Wrong.pdf [12/09/2015]
  • Earle, R. ed (1999). Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945. Warwick Studies in the European Humanities. Aldershot: Ashgate.
  • Hyland, K. (1998). Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Hyland, K. (2000). Disciplinary Discourses: Social interactions in academic writing. Harlow: Pearson Education.
  • Hyland, K. (2002). Authority and invisibility: Authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1091-1112.
  • Hyland, K. (2008). Disciplinary voices: Interactions in research writing. English Text Construction, 1(1), 5-22.
  • Lakoff, R.T. (1990). Talking power: The politics of language in our lives. New York: Basic Books.
  • Lareo, I. and Montoya. A. (2007). Scientific Writing: Following Robert Boyle’s Principles in Experimental Essays –1704 and 1998. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 20, 119-137.
  • Mischke, G.E. (2009). Analysing involvement in distance-education study-guides: an appraisalbased approach. UNISA. http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/1864/00front.pdf? sequence=3 [25/09/2015]
  • Moskowich, I. (2013). Eighteenth-century female authors: women and science in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(4), 467-487.
  • Moskowich, I; Lareo, I; Camiña. G. and Crespo, B. (2012). A Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Moskowich, I. and Crespo, B. (2015). Involved in writing science: nineteenth-century women in the Coruña Corpus. International Journal of Language and Linguistics.
  • Narrog, H. (2012). Modality, Subjectivity, and Semantic Change: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Newton, I. (1704). Opticks. London : Printed for Sam Smith, and Benj. Walford, printers to the Royal Society, at the prince's Arms in St. paul's Church-yard. http://archive.org/details/ opticksortreatis00newt [09/03/2013].
  • Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2nd edition. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/.
  • Prelli, L.J. (1989). The rhetorical construction of scientific ethos. In H.W. Simon (Ed.), Rhetoric in the human science, (pp. 87-104). London: Sage.
  • Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2006). English at the onset of the normative tradition. In L. Mugglestone (Ed.), The Oxford History of English, (pp. 240-273). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Utz, J.P.; German, J.L; Louria, D.B; Emmons, Ch.W. and Bartter, F.C. (1959). Pulmonary Aspergillosis with Cavitation — Iodide Therapy Associated with an Unusual Electrolyte Disturbance. New England Journal of Medicine, 260, 264-268. doi: 10.1056/NEJM1959020526 00603.