Continuity and change in eighteenth-century medical writing in English

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Medical case reports and scientific thought-styles

This article continues a series of studies connected with the Scientific Thought-styles project (1995-), and discusses the formation of genre conventions of vernacular medical case reports in a long diachronic perspective. The theoretical background is explained first, with accompanying material from medical history and the philosophy of science. The epistemological status of the genre is on the practical side: besides theories, experience is valued, and relating what happened in a typical case of illness is the core function of the genre. In addition, the function of enhancing the efficacy of the cure grows prominent in some texts. Case studies are narratives of illness and endangered human life, and the model of natural narratives (Labov & Waletzky, 1967) can be identified in these stories. The method of analysis is qualitative and relies on illuminative examples from two electronic corpora Middle English Medical Texts (2005) and Early Modern Medical Texts (2010). The article finishes with a modern example that shows a shift to non-human technical facts.

General periodical : The Gentleman’s Magazine

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General treatises and textbooks

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Professional and lay medical texts in the eighteenth century : A linguistic stylistic assessment

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Polite society language practices : Letters to the Editor on medical issues in The Gentleman’s Magazine

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Contrastive Pragmatics in a Diachronic Perspective : Insights from Othello

The paper provides an overview of the interface of contrastive and historical pragmat- ics and a case study of Othello’s monologue. The emerging lines of development at the cross-roads of contrastive and historical pragmatics cover, in particular, speech acts, forms of discursive behaviour and stance. In the analysis, German, Swedish, Finnish and Polish translations from different periods are compared to show differences in the above-mentioned features. The illustrations are contextualised in order to show the discursive sensitivity of these linguistic items and their cross-linguistic diver- sity. The study reveals some tendencies and diachronic developments in translation strategies and underlines the need to include historical analyses in the realm of con- trastive research.Peer reviewe

Introduction

http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/linguelinguaggi/issue/view/1676Non peer reviewe