Persuasion markers and ideology in eighteenth century philosophy texts (CEPhiT)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the presence of persuasion markers in the eighteenth century texts of the Corpus of English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT), a sub-corpus of the Coruña Corpus.2 It is also my intention to ascertain to what an extent the genteel, social and religious ideology of the period is present in both the texts and in prefaces to these works written by the authors themselves. The paper will be organized as follows. Section One describes the function of persuasion in the author-reader relationship of eighteenth century English-speaking countries, as well as the dominant ideological postulates which underpin it. Section Two presents the methodology and the corpus material selected for the analysis, Biber’s Multidimensional Analysis (MD henceforth) and CEPhiT, respectively. Section Three sets out the analysis of data, through which I offer a quantitative approach to persuasive strategies followed by a functional interpretation, paying special attention to the text-type/genre variable and comparing overall results with those that refer specifically to female authors. Conclusions and final remarks will be discussed in Section Four.

A Study on Noun Suffixes: Accounting for the Vernacularisation of English in Late Medieval Medical Texts

This paper seeks to contribute to the study of the vernacularisation process in late Middle English by measuring up to what an extent concrete and abstract noun suffixes (in line with Dalton-Puffer 1996) attach to either Germanic or Romance bases in the medical texts extracted from the MEMT (Middle English Medical Texts) corpus. The findings obtained have been further described according to text type or genre and to target audience/readership. The description of these suffixes in relation to all the parameters already mentioned has confirmed the predominance of abstract suffixes of Romance origin although Germanic abstract suffixes are also abundant. More hybrid formations have been found with Germanic noun suffixes than with Romance ones which might be indicative of their versatility towards vernacularisation

There are differences between scientific and non-scientific English indeed: a case study

[Abstracts] This study considers the behaviour of one specific stance adverb, indeed. In a previous analysis of scientific texts, indeed was found to be one of the most frequently used adverbs in the expression of emphatic standpoint evincing authorial presence (Moskowich and Crespo 2014). Also noted was its differing use by male and female writers, as well as differences according to genre and the geographical provenance of authors. My aim in the present study is to see whether such behaviour of indeed is also found in non-scientific texts, and if so to what extent. The analysis will include both scientific and non-scientific texts from the nineteenth century, a period in which the general fixation of English in its contemporary form had already taken place. The initial hypothesis is that authors of scientific texts tended to express themselves with more caution, even tentativeness, in comparison to authors writing less “impersonal” texts. External factors might also lead to identifiable variations in use in scientific writing, these including the sex of the speaker, plus his or her self-confidence as a writer. Such factors will be used as variables in the analysis. Data for scientific writing will be drawn from the Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA) and the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET); the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE) will be used for non-scientific texts

Involved In Writing Science: Nineteenth-Century Women in the Coruña Corpus

[Abstract]The aim of this work is to offer an overview of female scientific writing in English in the nineteenth century. In particular, we want to focus on the analysis of the more or less informational style of texts written by women. Variables such as discipline or subject-matter and genre will be used to measure the way in which the informative character of scientific texts develops once Empiricism is well settled. Assuming the andro-centric nature of scientific discourse in the Modern Age, the survey of these variables will help us explore the extent to which this informational style is revealed in female scientific works. The fact that these authors are women could imply that some involvement on their part may be required. This could be caused by extra-linguistic factors such as the need to be taken more seriously not only in a field completely dominated by males but also in the social context surrounding women’s lives in general

Adjectival forms in Middle English: syntactic and semantic implications.

[Abstract] Our main purpose in this paper is to look into the place of adjectives in a particular period in the history of English as regards their position in the Noun Phrase and whether such position may somehow alter the meaning of the adjective and of the NP itself. To this end, only adjectives in an attributive function both as premodifiers or postmodifiers of the head will be considered. In section 1 we will briefly attempt to draw a line between the class “adjective” and other morphological classes considering different viewpoints. Section 2 will be devoted to the consideration of word-order as one of the factors characterising adjectives inside the NP and how their position may alter the meaning of the whole phrase. The next step in our research will be embodied in section 3 where we will present the corpus material for our study taken from the Middle English part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and section 4 will provide the analysis of the data obtained from our evidence. Section 5 will finally supply our conclusions. We will attempt —if possible— to find an explanation grounded on syntactic and semantic criteria for the different shades of meaning found to depend on position

CETA in the context of the Coruña Corpus

[Abstract] The Coruña Corpus (CC): a Collection of Samples for the Historical Study of English Scientific Writing is a project on which the MUSTE group has been working since 2003 in the University of A Coruña (Spain). It has been designed as a tool for the study of language change in English scientific writing in general as well as within the different scientific disciplines (excluding medicine) between 1650 and 1900. Its purpose is to facilitate investigation at all linguistic levels, although, in principle, phonology is not included among our intended research topics. At the same time, we believe that the CC is an excellent tool for the study of scientific register/style at particular moments in history: it also offers the researcher the chance to analyse how this ‘specific English’ behaves from a synchronic point of view. To allow for socio-linguistic research using these scientific texts, we have included, when possible, some personal details about the author of each sample and, even, about the work from which the sample has been extracted in a separate file. From a technical point of view, all the texts have been keyed in following the Text Encoding Initiative conventions and saved in the XML format. The use of an extended mark-up language will make wide distribution and exploitation possible. Moreover, in order to retrieve information from the compiled data, we have decided to create a corpus management tool. Loosely speaking, the Coruña Corpus Tool is an Information Retrieval system, where the indexed textual repository is a set of compiled documents that constitutes the CC

Different Paths for Words and Money: The Semantic Field of Commerce and Finance in Middle English

[Abstract] Our aim in this paper is to examine the relationship between society and language change. Development such as the discovery of new territories and the introduction of new and exotic products and practices are known to have caused a significant increase in the number of terms with economic nuances from the sixteenth century onwards. We belive that the economy is a good indicator of relations among different groups of people and of the way in which those relations contributed to the evolution of language even from the early stages, a conclusion we base on the etymological origin of specialised terms introduced during Middle English

Stance is present in scientific writing, indeed. Evidence from the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing

[Abstract]Stance as a pragmatic feature has been discussed widely in recent years, although the analysis of its presence in the scientific register has been more limited. Stance is most clearly seen in the use of adverbs (Quirk et al. 1985; Biber et al. 1999; Huddleston – Pullum 2002), providing a comment on the propositional content of an utterance. Thus, in any speech act the information they transmit involves both participants, which in the case of academic prose are the writer and reader. Biber et al. (1999) have claimed that oral registers exhibit the highest number of stance adverbs and that these are “relatively common” in academic prose (Tseronis 2009). In this paper we try to ascertain the extent to which stance adverbs were used in Late Modern scientific discourse, and whether differences in use can be observed between British and American authors and also across disciplines and genres, taking the orality or written nature of texts as a key feature in the analysis. Data have been drawn from around one hundred and twenty authors, from three sub-corpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (see also Zea, this volume). Each of these sub-corpora contains extracts of texts from different scientific disciplines written between 1700 and 1900. However, for the present study, only nineteenth-century authors have been selected. The material also allowed us to consider whether the sex of a writer had a bearing on the use of these forms. Ultimately, we have found that the most frequently used stance adverbs are those indicating inclusiveness and expressing either emphasis or tentativeness. Curiously enough, they are more abundant in texts written by North American authors and when we come to sex, male uses exceed by far female ones.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad;FFI2013-42215-

Persuasion in English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT)

[Abstract]The aim of this paper is to offer a description of the Corpus of English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT) as well as to present a pilot study on persuasion strategies. Although this corpus contains samples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only eighteenth-century texts have been selected for this study. Methodologically speaking, some specific linguistic features indicating persuasion and argumentation (Biber, 1988) have been searched for: predictive modals, necessity modals, conditional subordinators and verbs with a suasive meaning. The interpretation of our findings will provide an overview of the author-reader relationship in late Modern English Philosophy writings, especially focusing on variables such as sex or genre.Galicia. Consellería de Economía e Industria; 10 PXIB 167 061 PR

The limits of my language are the limits of my world: The Scientific Lexicon from 1350 to 1640

[Abstract] A diachronic compilation of different types of texts such as the Helsinki Corpus provides adequate material for a preliminary approach to the degree of diffusion of scientific/technical vocabulary (mainly nouns). The presence of this specific lexicon in writings other than scientific may be taken as an indicator of this diffusion. In addition, the lexical features of certain texts may originate a variety of language for specific purposes as a linguistic response to external demands. Socio-economic specialisation in a speech community is paralleled by the creation of specific registers