Turo Hiltunen

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.