Interpreting the world of late modern English medical writing
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Maura Ratia
Abstract
In this chapter we study the use of first- and second-person pronouns and passive constructions (BE + PP) in medical and scientific journal articles in a long diachrony. In the analysis, three corpora were used: The Corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, The Corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts and the Medicor corpus. We set out to explore whether the shift from the authorcentred writing of the early modern period to the present-day impersonal style originated in the eighteenth century. Our quantitative study shows that early specialized medical journal articles did not spearhead the change towards more impersonal writing: the frequency of first- and second-person pronouns remained high and the use of passives increased only slightly in the eighteenth century. The qualitative analysis indicates that discourse forms such as the letter and narratives favour first- and second-person pronouns, and the absence of these discourse forms in present-day medical research articles at least partly explains their decline.
Abstract
In this chapter we study the use of first- and second-person pronouns and passive constructions (BE + PP) in medical and scientific journal articles in a long diachrony. In the analysis, three corpora were used: The Corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, The Corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts and the Medicor corpus. We set out to explore whether the shift from the authorcentred writing of the early modern period to the present-day impersonal style originated in the eighteenth century. Our quantitative study shows that early specialized medical journal articles did not spearhead the change towards more impersonal writing: the frequency of first- and second-person pronouns remained high and the use of passives increased only slightly in the eighteenth century. The qualitative analysis indicates that discourse forms such as the letter and narratives favour first- and second-person pronouns, and the absence of these discourse forms in present-day medical research articles at least partly explains their decline.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
-
I Meaning in time and space
- Digital discourse and its discontents 9
- Text, intertext and meaning 37
- Hic sunt dracones 65
-
II Variation in time
- Presenting knowledge of the world 89
- Interpreting the world of late modern English medical writing 113
- A corpus-based analysis of grammarians’ references in 19th-century British grammars 133
- Construing justice 173
-
III Variation in space
- Variation in the complementiser choice between if and whether 203
- Using intensifier-adjective collocations to investigate mechanisms of change 231
- There’s different types 257
- Academic prose across countries 283
- A corpus-based study of metadiscoursal boosters in applied linguistics dissertations written in Thailand and in the United States 321
- Patterns and meanings of hedging verbs in English-medium research articles by Chinese and Western scholars 351
- The EMI campus as site and source for a multimodal corpus 377
- Index 403
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
-
I Meaning in time and space
- Digital discourse and its discontents 9
- Text, intertext and meaning 37
- Hic sunt dracones 65
-
II Variation in time
- Presenting knowledge of the world 89
- Interpreting the world of late modern English medical writing 113
- A corpus-based analysis of grammarians’ references in 19th-century British grammars 133
- Construing justice 173
-
III Variation in space
- Variation in the complementiser choice between if and whether 203
- Using intensifier-adjective collocations to investigate mechanisms of change 231
- There’s different types 257
- Academic prose across countries 283
- A corpus-based study of metadiscoursal boosters in applied linguistics dissertations written in Thailand and in the United States 321
- Patterns and meanings of hedging verbs in English-medium research articles by Chinese and Western scholars 351
- The EMI campus as site and source for a multimodal corpus 377
- Index 403
