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ABSTRACT
This paper presents a corpusbased study of a group of lexical verbs in eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific texts. The study has a twofold aim. Firstly, it aims to select four types of verb classes (verbs of communication, desire, aspectuals and perception) identified by Levin and Noonan and explore their use in the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts, a subcorpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Secondly, it aims to determine if the frequency of these verbs varies based on the gender of the authors. Further, the study seeks to ascertain if a shifting pattern could be attested in the use of these verbs throughout the two centuries examined in the corpus, at a time when the scientific register was already becoming established. The findings of the study obtained from the greater or lesser occurrence of the verbs in question over the two centuries indicate which ones were more frequent in Life Sciences texts, whether they were more commonly used either by men or women and whether there was a pattern of continued usage of these verbs in Late Modern English scientific language rather than a shift towards nominalisation in this type of discourse.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 At the beginning of the eighteenth century in England, the repeal of laws that regulated printing led to a new situation, one involving the end of the church and government supervision of publications, the expansion of the unregulated printing trade into the provinces, and the removal of sanctions against the unauthorised printing of authors’ works. This constituted a redefinition of print culture, which in turn contributed to the expansion and availability of books (Johns Citation2003: 537).
2 It is undeniable that the different genres used at that time served as a mechanism for disseminating scientific information. Some of these genres paved the way for the present-day methods of knowledge transmission. For instance, treatises, which intended to inform, preceded the textbook, while the scientific report, targeted at a more specialised audience, was the predecessor of the journal articles. For this reason, the present comparative study is being conducted considering the different genres represented in different subcorpora of the Coruña Corpus.
3 There are other classifications that have been developed to extend and complement Levin’s classification such as the integration of 57 novel classes for verbs not covered by her into VerbNet (Korhonen & Briscoe Citation2004). These new classes have not altered the verb classes selected for this study.
4 Three subcategories are not represented in the corpus under analysis given the date of composition of the texts and their content: verbs of manner of speaking (subcategory 37.3), verbs of instrument of communication (subcategory 37.4), and chitchat verbs (subcategory 37.6).
5 The verb imagine is included in Noonan’s Immediate perception predicates class, but Levin considers this verb to be part of a different class, appoint verbs in verb class 29. Due to this lack of agreement, the analysis of this verb has been omitted.
6 The low number of occurrences documented of this verb class in the corpus suggests that the verbs in question were not the type of verbs needed to transmit this type of knowledge, as mentioned above. This finding will be contrasted in future studies of other subcorpora in the Coruña Corpus.
7 See Moskowich et al. (Citation2021: 10).
8 See Moskowich et al. (Citation2021: 11).
9 Counts from texts of different length must be normalised so that they are fully comparable (Biber et al. Citation1998: 283). In this case, whereas the samples in the corpus by both men and women are all of the same length (10,000 words), the total number of texts per gender is not balanced and thus normalization was necessary.
10 Regarding the variation in capitalization observed in the book titles, we would like to clarify that all book titles included in the corpus have been faithfully reproduced as they appear in their original sources. No editing or polishing has been undertaken to alter the capitalization or formatting of these titles. We have diligently maintained the integrity of the titles to ensure accuracy and authenticity present in the corpus.