Eighteenth Century Female Authors: Women and Science in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing

Abstract

This paper explores the use of linguistic features characteristic of impersonal or personal style in scientific writing by female authors in the eighteenth century. Variables such as discipline, subject-matter and genre are used to assess the ways in which abstract thought and argumentation are expressed by women, given that, even when these works were accepted by the scientific establishment, such modes of expression were more typical of men and men's writing in the context of the Modern Age. Data from different genres and disciplines (History, Philosophy, Astronomy and Life Sciences) will be used in order to obtain more reliable findings.

Keywords:

• Corpus-Linguistics
• Scientific Register
• Late Modern English
• Involvement

Notes

¹ I am not dealing here with the concepts of sex as a biological feature opposed to gender as a psychological characteristic of the individual. The information we have about these authors relates exclusively to their biological condition as women.

² The name formerly given to this particular dimension was ‘abstract vs non-abstract information’ (Biber 1988; Biber & Finegan 1997: 259).

³ Other text-types have been established. Such is the case with those proposed by the Helsinki Corpus (Kytö 1996) or those included in the Middle English Medical Texts (2005) and in Early Modern English Medical Texts (2010). This variety of classifications is a manifestation of changing textual traditions and needs.

⁴ Figures have, in all cases, been normalized to the highest raw frequency in the set.