The Development of Scientific Writing: Linguistic Features and Historical Context

Introduction Diachronic study of scientific text Systemic Functional Linguistics - a suitable framework Thematic structure Grammatical metaphor Part 1: From Chaucer to Newton 1. Beginning with Chaucer Where it all began The Passive Personal pronouns Nominalization 2. Between Chaucer and Newton A troubled period Francis Bacon Robert Boyle Henry Power and Robert Hooke Experimental and descriptive sciences 3. The Royal Society and Newton The place of the Royal Society and its Philosophical Transactions Newton Newton and the influence of Latin Newton and Huygens Part 2: The intervening centuries 4. A way forward Two centuries of increasing nominalization The corpus 5 Passives Increasing use of passives Passives and process types 6 First person pronoun Subjects A rare phenomenon The eighteenth century situation Continuation in the nineteenth century The twentieth century: a radical change 7. Nominalization Nominalizing processes Experiment Nominalized processes as Modifiers 8. Thematic Structure Motivation for the passive The Grammatical Functions of Topical Themes Textual Themes Interpersonal Themes Thematic progression 9. The semantic nature of Themes A typology of Themes Minor types of Theme Features of the experiment The human element Textual reference Mathematics 10. An Interpersonal coda Ancients and Moderns Epistolary framing Praise Criticism Community Provenance Referencing Appendix 1 Appendix 2