Menzel, Katrin
Medical discourse in Late Modern English: Insights from the Royal Society Corpus.
Hiltunen, Turo; Taavitsainen, Irma; (Ed.): Corpus pragmatic studies on the history of medical discourse (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series; Vol. 330), John Benjamins, pp. 79-104, Amsterdam, 2022.
This chapter demonstrates how the Royal Society Corpus, a richly annotated corpus of around 48,000 English scientific journal articles covering more than 330 years, can be used for lexico-grammatical and pragmatic studies that contribute to a broader understanding of the development of medical research articles. The Late Modern English period together with several decades before and after this time frame was a productive period in the medical output of the Royal Society. This chapter addresses typical linguistic features of scientific journal articles from medical and related sciences from this period demonstrating their special status in the context of other traditional and emerging disciplines in the corpus data. Additionally, language usage and text-type conventions of historical medical research articles will be compared to the features of corpus texts on medical topics from Present-day English.