non-institutionalised activity, often considered a hobby or part-time occupation and thus not something in itself serious or important. The women I have included for this study all enjoyed the kind of very favourable personal circumstances conducive to becoming historywriters. Crespo (105) claims that “the fathers of our female writers normally occupied important social posts, being bankers, landowners, members of parliament or merchants interested to a certain extent in intellectual matters.” This is exactly the case of one ofthe eighteenth-century authors under study here, Sarah Scott, whose background accurately matches this description. The case of Elizabeth Justice is different, but also one of educational privilege; her father was one of those people concerned with ladies’ education and sent her to a boarding school, as well as providing her with a private tutor. Women inthe nineteenth century saw some social changes regarding their position, but access to education was still for a small minority. Both Scott and Justice wrote textsof an instructional character, Scott’s work being addressed to children, whereas Justice’s travelogue included observations on everyday life, and Crespo (104) has argued that the latter presents significant differences from comparable works by contemporary male authors.
span covered by the Coruña CorpusofEnglish Scientific Writing (henceforth CC). All samples will be extracted from different sub-corpora of CC, namely, CETA (CorpusofEnglishTexts on Astronomy) (Moskowich et al, 2012), CEPhiT (CorpusofEnglish Philosophy Text, forthcoming), CELiST (CorpusofEnglish Life Sciences Texts) and CHET (CorpusofHistoryEnglishTexts). Given that women writersin this period mainly devoted themselves to the creation of fictional works, the number of samples written by female authors in these corpora is not very high but it reflects eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific reality accurately. Since we will be working with samples from different corpora devoted each to a particular scientific discipline, we will use this as one ofthe variables inthe analysis. Disciplinary conventions might exert an influence on how the author communicates science. The second variable will be time. To this respect we will present and compare our results per century, considering that, as could be expected, the findings will point to an evolution towards detachment, mainly intexts. Finally, the text-type or genre to which the text belongs, that is, generic conventions, could also determine the final writing.
This period provided for a great expansion of knowledge and changed science making it more useful and accessible to audiences. However, these changes did not cause a real democratisation. Access to knowledge continued to be restricted on the basis of social status and, even though science was liberated fromthe control ofthe Church, New Science also became institutionalised quickly, with new groups of control producing norms and developing a socially stratified science in which there were different ranks or classes. The situation did not stay static, however. Initially, discrimination against middle and lower classes and, particularly, women, was even more acute than in previous centuries, but the situation improved during the nineteenth century, when the ongoing professionalization and the introduction of universal education allowed for a higher accessibility to scientific knowledge. At the same time, a parallel process of specialization was taking place: knowledge started to be considered in terms of disciplines, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many new disciplines, such as history or chemistry, appeared in universities. During the period, astronomy focused on the discovery of celestial bodies as a result ofthe improvement of telescopes and applied Newton’s discoveries to the study ofthe physical interactions between these bodies. Life sciences focused on the study ofthe fossils and geological evidence, on the one hand, and the relationships between living beings, on the other. This latter trend led to the production of taxonomies and the discovery ofthe laws of inheritance, and, later, to Darwin’s discovery of Evolution. Philosophy focused on the dispute about the source of knowledge, and whether it stemmed from reasoning, as defended by rationalists, or fromthe senses, as defended by empiricists.
As we have seen earlier, specialised diachronic corpora permit to look at the evolution of a particular register along a given period of time. Such is the case ofthe Coruña CorpusofEnglish Scientific Writing (hereafter Coruña Corpus), an electronic corpus which is currently being compiled by the members ofthe Research Group in Multidimensional Studies inEnglish (MuStE) 15 at the University of A Coruña (Spain) and which provided the materials for this piece of research. The Coruña Corpus is part ofthe on-going research project Coruña Corpus: A Collection of Samples for the Historical Study ofEnglish Scientific Writing, conceived for the diachronic study of variation and change in late Modern scientific English. Thecorpus covers a period of two hundred years (1700-1900) and consists, to date, of four subcorpora which contain samples fromtexts on Astronomy, Philosophy, Life Sciences and History (while other subcorpora, dealing with texts on Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics and Linguistics, are currently under compilation). Each subcorpus has a total of twenty texts per century 16 , and therefore two texts per decade, while each text sample is ca. 10,000 words long, excluding figures, graphs, tables, formulae and punctuation marks, as well as quotations containing text reproduced literally from other sources, or fragments written in languages other than English. On the other hand, thecorpus contains samples of both male and female authors who were educated in different English-speaking regions (England, Scotland, Ireland, the US and Canada) and who used different genres (e.g. treatises, essays, textbooks…) in their writings. However, in order to avoid stylistic idiosyncrasies, only one work per author was selected. The reasons behind the principles followed inthe compilation ofthe Coruña Corpus, including representativeness and balance, corpus size and time span, as well as the selection of authors for the different scientific disciplines, are dealt with extensively in Moskowich & Crespo (2007), Moskowich & Parapar (2008), Lareo (2009), and
lled collocations in Mel’čuk’s (1994) terminology— were dealt with in Lareo and Esteve (2008) and Lareo (2009) or conditional structures were delved into by Puente-Cas- telo and Monaco (2013) or Puente-Castelo (2016). Our interest for the socio-historical dimension oftheEnglish language has recently grown into several and gra- dual forays into the wide field of discourse analysis. In those we have studied written textsfrom various discur- sive perspectives such as stance, persuasion, abstraction, involvement, modality and women’s scientific writing. The triggering effect of all this was the creation of what has been and still is MuStE’s flagship, the Coruña CorpusofEnglish Scientific Writing (CC for short). Designed to be a generic or specific corpus —as opposed to a gene- ral corpus—, it is now well known and respected within the academic community. An electronic corpus is not a mere juxtaposition oftexts —as sometimes understood inthe field of literary studies. It is not a simple bunch of scanned images either as these formats cannot possibly be read and processed by a computer. On the contrary, the same as Biber (1993), Meyer (2002) and Crystal (2003), we agree that a corpus should be briefly defined as a “principled” collection of machine-readable texts. The truth is that the idea of creating a corpus, a speciali- sed one focusing on scientific English, first arose in 2003 when some members ofthe MuStE group were awarded funding fromthe University of A Coruña to explore the historical background ofEnglish as the language of scien- ce. We soon realised that the compilation of a corpusof scientific textsfromthe eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies would fill a gap inthe field ofEnglish historical linguistics. At that moment, we had the examples ofthe Helsinki CorpusofEnglishTexts (Rissanen et al. 1991) and the Lampeter CorpusofEnglish Tracts (Schmied et al, 1999). In Helsinki, Prof. Taavitsainen and her colleagues were working on the compilation of MEMT (Middle English Medical Texts) and we thought our corpus would complement theirs inthehistoryof scientific English as, initially, the Helsinki project was intended to cover the Middle Ages and the early Modern period, focusing on medical texts.
Authorial presence in Late Modern scientific writing can be detected, among other linguistic devices, through the use of stance adverbs. We are aware ofthe restrictions ofthe current study, in which we have not searched for all the possible types of stance adverbs but have limited ourselves to an initial list proposed by Quirk et al. (1985) and Biber (1988). Nevertheless, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn fromthe findings. Not all the types from this list have been traced inthe corpora examined, and many more occur just once. This gives the impression of a high degree of lexical richness to express stance through this word class. Yet, the three most frequent items, indeed, generally and perhaps, all transmit a particular author position: emphasis, inclusiveness and tentativeness, respectively. These are the main traces that authors leave in their texts to render themselves visible. It is also remarkable that we have found a dissimilarity of frequencies across disciplines, with Life Sciences showing the highest rates of occurrence and Historythe lowest. This runs contrary to our expectations, and no coherent explanation appears feasible until we turn to the variables of sex and genre.
Thus, the time span selected follows unambiguous motives. In general, the late ModernEnglish period is characterised by antagonistic tendencies regarding language. A movement that purported the customary use of Latin in scientific texts coexisted with another that suggested that disseminating knowledge inthe vernacular would undoubtedly reach a wider audience. Also, to make matters worse a third movement intended to create a universal scientific language from scratch. Though the date for the vernacularisation of science has been set as early as 1375 (Taavitsainen & Pahta 2004), it is nonetheless certain that we cannot talk about an outburst oftexts written inEnglish until the turn ofthe seventeenth century, with a consolidation inthe eighteenth, since even the most important promoters ofthe scientific revolution published their works in Latin inthe first place (Bacon’s Novum Organum, Newton’s Principia). In sum, the eighteenth century seems, therefore, a fairly reasonable moment inthehistoryoftheEnglish language to begin an approach to the morphological devices employed inthe period to coin new linguistic elements. We must bear in mind, however, that changes happening inthe eighteenth century are not likely to be largely observed until the following century, especially those closer to the turn ofthe century. Future studies using the nineteenth century section ofthe Coruña Corpus will definitely address this issue.
As part of a major project on left dislocation inthe recent historyoftheEnglish language, this paper aims at defining the Left Dislocation phenomenon taking data from a late ModernEnglishcorpus as a point of departure. Given that the label LD has not been uniformly applied to the same periphery phenomena across the board inthe specialized literature, it is crucial to make clear what I understand and label as LD in order to continue on with functional and pragmatic analyses in my future research. Furthermore, the aim of this paper is to point out several grammatical features (both syntactic and semantic) which have an effect on the conception ofthe examples retrieved as more or less prototypical examples of LD, or as non-LD. I base this investigation on data taken from two electronic collections containing literary textsfromthe Britain ofthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After a previous selection oftexts, a corpusof over six hundred thousand words was gathered for each century, adding up to an overall corpusof more than one million two hundred words. All LD tokens here presented have been retrieved through manual search.
Inthe current study, we will be using the same material. However, in order to go a step further, we will explore the syntagmatic relations of these two adverbs and their accompanying modal verbs. Although it is widely assumed that scientific English has shifted from author-centered to object-centered (Atkinson 1998), the presumably objective nature of scientific discourse has in fact been questioned, with the use of hedging (Hyland 1998) and other elements expressing stance (Moskowich and Crespo 2014; Alonso Almeida and Inés 2016; Dossena 2017) cited as evidence here. Inthe present study, we will continue our description of late ModernEnglish scientific writing by assessing how the modal verbs accompanying these stance adverbs can modulate the expression of tentativeness. Perhaps and possibly both indicate an author’s desire to show tentativeness and uncertainty, as well as being devices that seek the reading public’s involvement inthe presentation of content (Seoane Posse 2016). The use of stance adverbs of this kind not only shows authorial presence, but also demonstrates a covert interaction with the reader, which makes these texts more engaging for the latter.
clichés). Nowadays, there is a growing demand in translation and localization industry as well as in terminology and lexicography to quickly retrieve LRD fromthe text collections. Therefore, an effective model for this purpose could become a burning issue. The parallel corpus PEST-INTER will be specially developed to ensure the processing of this model. In order to be an appropriate tool thecorpus should contain thetextsin languages with different structure (Russian, Finnish, English, Swedish and French). In addition, thecorpus should have a suitable structure, which will allow processing a large scale of research tasks and facilitating its incorporation inthe larger database of state treaties PEST (COMS, University of Tampere).
CR theories have been received enthusiastically by many researchers and a number of studies on cultural differences involving different languages are available. These studies fall into three main strands of research: studies investigating academic discourse, studies investigating certain linguistic and discursive patterns and studies based on the connection between Translation Studies (TS) and CR. Taking into account the nature ofthe present paper and in order to pin down other studies that have- sometimes partially, sometimes completely- dealt with the same type of linguistic-textual patterns as us, we will only focus on the studies belonging to the second group, and specially on those comparative studies which analyse the metatextual material oftexts 4 .
Abstraction can certainly be detected inthe use of specific terms, but since we are dealing with an asymmetrical power relation, it may be argued that female writers would perhaps resort to more subtle (even unconscious) ways of expressing abstract thought. For this reason, less obvious linguistic devices, such as conjuncts and adverbial subordinators, are ideal indicators of women’s ability to express abstraction, although it may still be the case that, given the social contexts that promoted the kind of asymmetry just mentioned, women may still have had to seek to conceal or disguise their abstract thoughts. Given the socially-motivated nature ofthe expression of abstraction here, it may be interesting to assess the extent to which the social evolution of women fromthe eighteenth to the nineteenth century was reflected in their writing strategies, looking particularly at devices to link ideas and build discourse. Moskowich and Monaco (2014) explored the evolution ofthe linguistic features typical of Biber’s dimension 5 (abstract vs. non-abstract style) in women and found a general increase in frequency over time. Such an increase, then, might also be observed inthe use of linking devices such as conjuncts and adverbial subordinators.
- Words that come directly fromEnglish. This would correspond to patent Anglicism in Pratt’s words, including items that are recognised by English speaking people as belonging to their mother tongue. In this section we find examples like ranking or hippy (Pratt, 1980: 116). In order to assure the provenance ofthe recorded entry, the etymological information provided by Spanish lexicographic references is checked. In past pieces of research (Tejedor and De la Cruz et al., 2005–06, 2007–08), we also relied on the information offered by other dictionaries, such as Diccionario del Español Actual and Diccionario de Uso del Español. Neverthesless, we have now based our selection of terms on the information given by Diccionario de la Lengua Española and Gran Diccionario de Anglicismos, since they are the latest updated publications. If the term is not present in any of these dictionaries, other British and American reference sources are consulted. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam- Webster Dictionary.
and benefactive alternation. To that purpose, she has analyzed the semantics of for- ditransitives against the background ofthe debate between projectionist and constructionist accounts of syntactic alternations and, at the same time, has tried to show that an alternation- based methodology can be used to explore the semantics ofthe benefactive construction and ofthe verb classes that are compatible with it. Revisiting the topic oftheEnglish for-dative alternation, she concludes that alternations can indeed serve as a heuristic to identify verb meanings and to interpret the semantic difference between for-ditransitives and to- ditransitives, associated with different verb classes and showing different passivization possibilities, in spite of their “shared surface form”.
This paper describes theCorpusof Free Trade Agreements (henceforth FTA), a specialized parallel corpusinEnglish and Spanish from Europe and America that is being prepared and aligned with Translation Corpus Aligner 2 (Hofland & Johansson, 1998). The data is taken from Free Trade Agreements officially signed and ratified by several countries and blocks of countries. Once complete, thecorpus will contain about 1.3 million words intheEnglish section and 1.5 million words in its Spanish counterpart. One ofthe aims is to study the specialized collocations that appear in this kind oftexts and the terminological value of specialized collocations as carriers of specialized information.
English has become increasingly dominant as a world language for communication in higher education. The simultaneous impact of globalization, the spread ofEnglish and technological development have transformed the learning and teaching methods ofEnglish as a lingua franca in an unprecedented way. (Warschauer, 2004). Consequently, being able to speak English has become crucial inthe current professional world. That is why students, whose mother tongue is not English, often have to develop a high level of competence in this language to pursue their studies. This requirement is especially imperative for students majoring inEnglish, who will have to perform as translators and interpreters in different contexts: tourism, business, commerce, international affairs, academic programs, and scientific communication, among others.
The insights provided by this paper regarding the cross-linguistic differences inthe expression of evaluative judgements of relevance can be applied to the field of translation practice and cross-cultural communication. Even if most journalistic opinion discourse is not usually translated, the way ideology and cultural issues are manifested through linguistic choices in a particular language may cross the boundaries of a particular genre or text type. This study also highlights the interdisciplinarity of studies in linguistics, depicting a continuum from (lexical) contrastive analysis to discourse analysis by pointing out aspects such as the interaction between writer and reader (persuasion), the sense of self ofthe writer (authorial stance) and the cultural context of production and reception of a text (English and Spanish societies), which could be exploited in future research.
Nowadays in Latin American countries, learning English has become a requirement for many different activities in people’s life, especially the ones who want to increase professional status and personal development. Thus, Ecuador’s government has changed the policies and laws to improve the way ofEnglish language teaching, and it has also invested in resources, training and educational programs for teachers, as well as, scholarships for students. Those teachers-students come from public and private schools. The purpose of this study is to provide a knowledge about the evolution oftheEnglish teaching process and how it was developed through the last decades. The findings of this research showed that the methods applied by the teachers varied according to the governments’ schemes of possible needs making shifts inthe methodology and ways of planning theEnglish classes. Perhaps, those changes did not cover the real students’ necessity.
These results show that, in fact, pronominal relativizers in Old and early Middle English abandon the higher positions ofthe hierarchy later than the lower ones: se-relative pronouns start their recession fromthe lower –less accessible– positions ofthe Accessibility Hierarchy. In fact, the last stronghold occupied by se relative pronouns is that of subject, with a frequency which goes from 74.4% (in O3) to 61.7% (in M1). Such restriction to a specific environment is typical of elements which are inthe process of becoming obsolete.
University, wrote that launching a person into the future without taking care to protect him/her from a collision with changes is like launching astronauts to the Moon undressed. And we find difficulty to quarrel with this statement. On the other hand, the main feature of education as the creation of a social image in which a person is called to implement his/her intentions is already unconditional integrity, integration of human abilities for adequate interaction with the environment. Despite this, they have not yet learned to look at education as a broad social phenomenon that goes far beyond purely pedagogical, professional, cognitive activity and predetermining possibilities of development, supported by competent human participation of all other spheres of social life. Therefore, now more than ever the education system shall not be limited to the task of training; education shall include a person, inthe words ofthe German teacher F. Frobel, “inthe past, the present and the future of culture”. Thus, identifying the overall global dynamics ofthe forms and content of professional identity inthe educational space, we believe that the state of crisis ofthe above-mentioned identity is partly associated with the breaking of moral and spiritual values. Thus, the experience of overcoming it is still seen inthe transition from formalized, distance professional training to the need for the university to participate in constructing a basic social reality in a sociocultural system that ensures full development ofthe individual, toward which the educational system gravitates by definition.