Resultados de la medición del coeficiente

This dissertation stems from the tradition of studies on register, and, more particularly, on scientific register. The study of scientific discourse (and, particularly, scientific writing¹) has been developing as a focal point for linguistic studies during the past few decades, configuring an exuberant area of research.

1 Even though oral transmission of knowledge was essential for the continuing exercise of science in the Medieval Era, the use of the written (rather than the oral) medium for the transmission of knowledge has been a defining feature of Institutionalised Science at least since Socrates’ dialogues were put into writing by Plato.

This institutionalisation was the result of a series of factors, in which the natural longer permanence of the written form combined with the “sacredness” sometimes associated to the Bible (and, by extension, to all written material) in medieval times. However, nowadays the prevalence of writing is also explained by the fact that scientific writing materials (articles, essays…) are, in Bazerman’s words, “the primary product of most disciplines, and a secondary product of all…” (1994: 104), to the point that these pieces of writing “are taken to constitute the knowledge of the disciplines”.

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This surge of interest have manifested principally in two main approaches: one is related with the teaching processes of academic writing as a subject taught both to native and non-native English speakers: the emergence of English for Academic Purposes as a discipline led to the necessity of having insightful descriptions of disciplinary discourse with which to inform its teaching processes. The other approach studies scientific discourse as an example of register variation, using the main product of the scientific endeavour, the scientific text, as evidence to analyse the practices and culture of the different disciplines, movements, paradigms, or schools. In Gray’s words, “describing and understanding patterns of language use in academic prose allows us to understand the disciplinary cultures and practices that they embody” (2011: 1).

This study is ingrained in this latter tradition, as it tries to contribute to the description of a given type of scientific discourse (English scientific writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and to identify the differences between different subtypes of this discourse, whilst at the same time relating these results to the reality of the different communities of scientists developing at the time, using the linguistic data as evidence to forward these analyses².

In what follows, the study will be described in full, with subsections focusing on its methodology, objectives, and contents. However, and before starting with these issues, it is necessary to clarify a crucial terminological issue.

1.1. Register, discourse, genre, text type, style. A short overview:

The reader may have noticed that the concepts scientific discourse or scientific writing have been used interchangeably in the previous paragraphs, referring to similar (or nearly similar) realities. It has also been common in the literature to refer to these same realities as genres, as did Biber (1988), distinguishing spoken and written genres; or Bhatia (1993, 1996, 2002), writing about academic or research genres. Thus, register and genre are two concepts that have been frequently used by different authors to refer to a similar reality, that of “varieties associated with particular situations of use and particular communicative purposes” (Biber & Conrad 2009: 21). Regretfully, these concepts are not perfectly synonymous, and are often defined with differing, sometimes opposite, criteria.

Thus, it is necessary to delimit the meaning of these and some other related concepts (discourse, text type, style) in this dissertation.

One example of author providing a distinction between these concepts is Johnstone. She (2002: 158) understands register as “a variety of language” which is used in a particular situation (i.e. scientific

2 However, and despite the tendency in some of these studies, theoretical frameworks have not been followed, but only taken as a reference, considering the general approach of the dissertation as eclectic.

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discourse, testamentary language), whilst genre would be a “recurrent verbal form” adopted by the given variety of language (i.e. a research article, a will)³. Both concepts do not purport a biunivocal relation: a single register may use different genres (scientific discourse can appear in the shape of a research article, but also as a conference presentation), whilst a single genre may “cut across registers” (Bhatia 1996: 45), as do text-books, which, irrespectively of the different disciplines they could be dealing with (this is, irrespectively of the particular register in each of them) present comparable communicative purposes. Taavitsainen (2001: 140) however, considers genres as a

“mental frame in people’s minds which gets realised in texts for a certain purpose in a certain cultural context”, whilst the linguistic realisation of these mental frames would be a text-type.

Biber (1988) in a first stage distinguishes between genres and text types. Genres would be categories of texts on account of rhetorical and non-linguistic criteria, most particularly the purpose of the author, whilst text-types are categories of texts which are grouped “on the basis of similarities in linguistic form, irrespective of genre classifications” (1988: 206). This is, the classification of text-types would initially ignore any extra-linguistic information, and would only interpret possible functional similarities after the linguistic-based groupings are made.

Biber later evolved his stance on this terminological problem, readdressing it several times and changing the labels used to name the concepts, sometimes together with Finegan and Conrad. In Biber

& Conrad (2009), the concepts whose distinctions are described are those of register, genre and style.

Register is “a variety associated with a particular situation of use (including particular communicative purposes)” and it is described on account of “three major components: the situational context, the linguistic features, and the functional relationships between the first two components” (Biber &

Conrad 2009: 6). Genres, on the contrary, are characterised by their rhetorical organisation, with their defining characteristics presenting a structural function in the text which is frequently the result of conventional constraints. Thus, scientific register would be characterised by particular linguistic features which are typical of the register and which have a function in it, whilst the research article as a genre would be characterised by its structural properties, such as the conventional structure Introduction-Method-Result-Discussion (IMRD), as well as the presence of an abstract and a conclusion. This difference implies that whilst registers can be analysed with the help of corpora, genres need complete texts, thus putting genre analysis beyond the scope of corpus linguistics and

3 This is, register (assimilated by Johnstone to the concept of style) would be characterised by the situation which raises the necessity of using the register and its particular linguistic characteristics, whilst genre (assimilated to text type) would be characterised by its communicative purposes and by how these purposes (as a result of the various influences of its practitioners over time) give way to different conventions around the way knowledge and information is transmitted and organised and how this is reflected in the formal nature of the texts.

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into the realm of rhetorical analysis. Finally, Biber and Conrad conceive styles, much like registers, as being characterised by their linguistic features, but, in this case, with features which are not the result of situational constraints, but which are, on the contrary, “associated with aesthetic preferences, influenced by the attitudes of the speaker/writer about language” (Biber & Conrad 2009: 18). Thus, the particular way of writing of an author or a group of authors would be an example of style.

1.1.1. Use of register in this dissertation.

This dissertation will follow Biber & Conrad’s (2009) definition of register as a situational variety of language which presents particular communicative purposes and particular linguistic uses with a definite function in it. The concepts scientific discourse and scientific writing will be used interchangeably with scientific register. The latter concept is, admittedly, not perfectly synonymous (scientific register includes both oral and written texts), but, given that this dissertation will only study written texts, the three concepts will be used interchangeably, taken to mean “(written) scientific register”.

An important characteristic of Biber & Conrad’s concept of register is that it is scalable, this is, it can be “defined at varying levels of specificity” (Gray 2011: 3), since linguistic productions are affected by several situational factors at once and, consequently, they allow different analyses focusing on the influence of any of these situational factors on a single linguistic variety. For instance, scientific register as a whole presents a series of particular situational characteristics, which can be the object of analysis by themselves or in contrast with other types of registers; but this is also the case with, for example, the different disciplines of scientific register, which constitute different disciplinary registers that can also be analysed by themselves or contrasting with one another.

The aim of this study is to analyse the scientific register in English as a whole, examining a corpus of texts which are taken to be representative of the general uses of the register, but it will also focus on several parameters at a higher level of specificity, such as the discipline to which the texts belong, the moment in time they were written, or the sex of the author, among others. However, in this dissertation, the term register will be reserved to refer to the lowest level of specificity only, this is, to scientific register as a whole. Consequently, analyses at a higher level of specificity will be said to study

“scientific register on account of the parameter X”. There are five such parameters: the year of publication of the text, denoting the diachronic evolution of the language, the sex of the author, their geographic origin, the discipline of the text and its genre⁴.

4 Genre as the name of this parameter is not to be understood in Biber & Conrad’s sense, but rather in Johnstone’s (2002), as a recurrent formal structure on which information could be transmitted, being an 4

1.2. Methodology: Uses of corpora in register variation.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of large electronic corpora has opened the way for large scale studies of register variation, allowing comparison of different registers, in different languages, and from a diachronic or synchronic point of view, among an enormous range of other different parameters. However, as far as the design of corpus research is concerned, any corpus study on register variation can be described on account of two criteria, defined by Gray (2011: 18ff): the comprehensiveness of the linguistic features being investigated and the way the information is obtained from the corpus.

In what concerns the first of the criteria, Gray distinguishes three different possibilities for the scope of the research. The first is studying a single linguistic feature in detail (be it a word, a grammatical structure or “a set of related items”) and focusing on its different variants. An example of this type of study is, for instance, a study on the prefixes and suffixes of nouns in astronomy and philosophy texts (Camiña 2012), or a study of deverbal nominalizations in astronomy texts (Bello 2014). The second type examines a series of related features which share a common communicative purpose, such as extenders in scientific discourse (Sánchez Barreiro, forthcoming). Finally, the third type focuses on a large set of non-necessarily-related linguistic features which help describing a language or linguistic variety. An example of such a study could be a Multidimensional Analysis (Biber 1988) on the scientific register in the eighteenth and nineteenth century (Monaco, forthcoming). These three categories are somewhat in a continuum, with certain studies presenting traces of both the first and second or the second and third types (Gray 2011: 20). This criterion was also defined by Biber (1988), who distinguished between macroscopic and microscopic studies: a microscopic study of textual variation

“provides a detailed description of the communicative functions of particular linguistic features”, while a macroscopic one “attempts to define the overall dimensions of variation in language” (Biber 1988: 61)

The second criterion focuses on how the information is extracted from the corpus. If the researcher approaches the corpus with a set of preconfigured search elements (mainly lexical items, or grammatical tags in tagged corpora), the research is considered to be corpus-based. Contrarily, if the researcher approaches the corpus as a whole, looking at general results in the whole corpus without a preconfigured set of searches, (for instance, keywords or frequently repeated patterns of words) the

expression of conventional discourse practices inside the scientific community. The use of this denomination has been decided by compilers of the Coruña Corpus after a lengthy consideration, which goes beyond the scope of this dissertation (although a very brief summary is provided in Chapter 4). It will be maintained for the sake of terminological unity in works using the Coruña Corpus.

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research is considered to be driven. There is, again, a cline between based and corpus-driven studies, presenting a plethora of intermediate approaches showing varying levels of hybridity between the two. Multidimensional analyses, with their guided selection of a set of features to be searched but entirely automatised factor analyses grouping these features together, are good examples of this hybrid approach.

This study will focus on a single grammatical structure, conditionals, which will be described comprehensively, studying its different formal and structural variations as well as its functions. The quantitative information to perform the analysis will be obtained from the Coruña Corpus by means of searching for a series of particles, which will be predefined after a review of the literature (in Chapter 2). Consequently, this study would be classified as a Type 1 (microscopic), corpus-based study.

As noted by Gray (echoing Reppen, Fitzmaurice & Biber (2002)), type 1 studies “often incorporate a register perspective by comparing the frequency and variants across registers” (2011: 21). This comparative approach is adopted here by comparing the distribution of the different types of conditionals and its functions across the different subsets of texts. This is done by means of selecting a series of parameters, both linguistic and extra-linguistic, whose interaction is then studied.

There are four linguistic parameters, defined in Chapters 2 and 3: the formal type of conditional (this is, the conditional particle in use), the order of the constituents of the conditional structure, its combination of verb forms, and its function in discourse. The extra-linguistic parameters, further explained in Chapter 4, are five: the sex and origin of the author, the discipline and the genre of the texts, and the date of publication of the sample, which helps analyse the diachronic evolution of the language.

The analysis of the results according to these different parameters makes it possible to provide a complete analysis of the use of conditionals as examples of the variation in scientific register as a whole, presenting a high number of different nuances which both enrich and deepen the study.

1.3. Objectives of the dissertation

The main goal of this study is to describe the use and functions of conditionals in English scientific writing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, trying to ascertain whether and how the use of conditionals reflects the general evolution of the scientific register during the period.

As explained above, according to Biber & Conrad, there are three major components to describe a register: “the situational context, the linguistic features, and the functional relationships between the first two components” (2009: 6). Following this model, this dissertation presents three main

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intermediate objectives. The first objective is to present a description of the context in which the register is used, analysing the different social and historical circumstances relevant to the shaping of the register. This objective occupies Chapter 1.

The second objective is to describe the linguistic information obtained during the study. After this objective is fulfilled, there will be “[b]aseline data on what types of conditional occur and how they relate to their discourse contexts”, data which “are essential if we hope to explain how conditionals are used rather than how we think they are used” (Ford & Thompson 1986: 354).

In order to achieve this second aim, it is necessary to fulfil a number of intermediate objectives. First, it is necessary to identify the scope of the structure under analysis, in order to delimit the different linguistic productions which are going to be analysed. This is examined in Chapter 2. Second, it is necessary to identify the parameters used to analyse the structure. These parameters are divided into two groups: linguistic parameters, which are analysed in Chapters 2 and 3, and extra-linguistic parameters, which are the object of analysis in Chapter 4. Third, it is necessary to describe the corpus from which the data has been extracted, also the object of Chapter 4. Finally, it is necessary to provide the actual quantitative data in relation with the different parameters and their interactions, providing the aforementioned “baseline data”. This is the objective of Chapter 5.

Finally, as in order to define a register it is not sufficient to present quantitative data, the last objective is to bring together the previous two steps and to analyse the associations (functional, conventional or otherwise) between the context and the linguistic features of the register, in order to explain the distribution of the results and the possible ways in which they may (or may not) be representative of the general nature of the register. This is the objective of Chapter 6 and the conclusions.

1.4. Contents of the dissertation

This dissertation is, then, organised as follows:

Chapter 1 will present the context of the register, analysing the period under study (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and the development of scientific register occurring at that moment.

Chapter 2 will focus on conditional structures, providing a definition of what is understood as such and determining their scope, as well as the parameters having to do with their formal variability.

Chapter 3 will present, after an extensive examination of the literature, a new typology to classify conditionals according to their function in discourse.

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Chapter 4 will describe the corpus from which the data has been obtained, the Coruña Corpus, and will also explain the methodology which has been followed as well as the extra-linguistic parameters which have been used to classify conditionals.

Chapter 5 will present the actual results of the analysis of data, according to the different linguistic and extra-linguistic parameters defined above.

Chapter 6 will relate the linguistic and the contextual data in order to explain how the results reflect the nature of the register under study.

And finally, the Conclusions will provide a summary of the dissertation and a reflection of the main findings in it.