Jukka Tyrkkö

Notes on eighteenth-century dictionary grammars

As the volume of new dictionaries and grammars surged during the eighteenth century, one of the natural by-products was the introduction of brief grammars as part of the preliminaries of dictionaries. This paper looks at what these grammars were like, what purposes they served, who wrote them and how much copying was involved in their production. The argument is made that dictionary grammars were often included for the added value they brought to the books as products, and not for the purpose of providing readers with thorough grammatical knowledge.

Making sense of digital textuality

One of the fundamental developments brought about by interactive and multilinear digital technology is the greater structural fragmentation of texts and the consequent re-evaluation of textual coherence. While the concept of text is contingent on some internal coherence, the new text type of electronic hypertext places new challenges on this paradigm by allowing ways of reading texts which would appear to disturb rather than build coherence. In relying on the flexible negotiation of readerly expectations with actual continuities experienced as the reading progresses, hypertextual coherence both encourages us to re-evaluate the rules of textual coherence from a more pragmatically oriented point of view and echoes some of the most recent theoretical views of how we interpret words in their surrounding co-text. This article presents an outline for a linguistic analysis of hypertextual coherence and points out the new dimensions of coherence left unaccounted for by conventional models. What happens when multilinearity makes texts unstable? How do we discuss a text – or meaningfully refer to one – if each reading has the power of transforming the potential narrative lines of a hypertext into a new literary object which may have never existed prior to that reading? Digital media rely on a new understanding of texts not as definitive objects, but as networks of relationships and meanings which by their very nature are relative, transitory, and subject to change at any moment. The potentially disturbing effects of such textual characteristics are counter-acted by the new, more fluid concept of digital coherence.

Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700-1800: A corpus for analysing eighteenth-century medical English

Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700-1800 : A corpus for analysing eighteenth-century medical English

Frequency of nominalization in Early Modern English medical writing

Nominalization has been noted as one of the fundamental properties of scientific English. It allows the dense packing of complex ideas into elements of clause structure, the addition of modifiers and qualifiers, and the backgrounding and foregrounding of information in the discourse. The device of nominalization in scientific prose is said to originate with Newton’s writings in the seventeenth century. This paper presents the results of an examination of a 1.7 million-word corpus of Early Modern English medical texts with the aim of determining whether a significant increase can be observed in the frequency of nominalizations between 1500 and 1700. The identification of nominalizations in the corpus is operationalized using a defined set of nominal suffixes. Our results suggest that nominalizations do not first emerge during the period of Empiricism in the second part of the sixteenth century, but that, at least in medical writing, a quantitative increase in nominalizations is observable even earlier: our data shows an increase in the frequency of nominalizations throughout the period under investigation. However, there is also a great deal of variation between individual texts throughout the 200-year period: many texts from the sixteenth century are entirely comparable to seventeenth-century texts in terms of nominalization density.

'Tis well known to barbers and laundresses: Overt references to knowledge in English medical writing from the Middle Ages to the Present Day

The discursive representation of knowledge, the fundamental objective of scientific inquiry, reflects underlying epistemic conditions of scientific thought (Bates 1995). Knowledge is communicated in scientific writing by means of lexical choice, discourse conventions and the organization of information. Over the long history of vernacular medicine, the writers of each era – from scholasticism and empiricism to evidence based medicine – have had their own perspectives on knowledge, revealed by the discursive practices they employed. Lexical items referring to the concept of knowledge (e.g. knowledge, information, doctrine) are investigated from the late Middle English period to Present-day English. We analyze variation and change in the lexicon of knowledge and analyze the discursive contexts in which the terms appear, showing how these have changed over time in different subgenres within learned medicine. The study makes use of several medical corpora with a total word count of roughly one million words: the MEMT is used for the Middle English period, and a selection of texts from the EMEMT corpus (articles from the Philosophical Transactions and other contemporary medical texts) represent the Early Modern English period. For the PDE period, we use a selection of research articles from academic journals and texts from the Medicor.

Blogging around the world

The borderless nature of blogging raises the question whether the traditional regionally defined varieties of English continue to hold true (see Crystal 2011). In order to investigate the extent to ...

New Methods of Bringing Image Data into Historical Linguistics: A Case Study with Medical Writing 1500–1700

ABSTRACT In recent years, advances in text annotation, the computational analysis of images and quantitative corpus linguistics have introduced new and exciting approaches to the study of text and paratext that combine the perspectives of historical linguistics and book history. However, so far most corpus-based research in this field has been hampered by the manual nature of the visual analyses (see, e.g., Tyrkkö, Marttila & Suhr 2013 and Tyrkkö 2013). The manual measuring and evaluation of visual features in a consistent manner is both slow and prone to human error, particularly with volumes of texts sufficient for statistical interrogation. As a result, while the linguistic analysis of historical texts can be rigorously systematic and corpus-based, the visual data, when taken into account at all, have typically been rather scarce and anecdotal in nature. In this paper, I will discuss new computational methods of analysing diachronic changes in visual features of title-pages and body text, and of combining that information with linguistic data. Using two linguistic corpora, Early Modern English Medical Texts and Late Modern English Medical Texts, and ImagePlot 1.1, a tool designed for the analysis of visual data, I will first map the paratextual features of the medical books and turn them into a matrix of statistically usable data points (Manovich 2012, 2013) for further processing.

9. The social and textual embedding of multilingual practices in Late Modern English: A corpus-based analysis

The social and textual embedding of multilingual practices in Late Modern English : A corpus-based analysis

Astronomy ‘Playne and Simple’: The Writing of Science between 1700 and 1900. Isabel Moskowich and Begoña Crespo (eds).

Astronomy ‘Playne and Simple’: The Writing of Science between 1700 and 1900 : Isabel Moskowich and Begona Crespo (eds). Amsterdam, Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2012. xi + 240 pp. ISBN 978-90-272-1194-1