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Article published In:
Language, Context and Text
Vol. 2:1 (2020) ► pp.171–186

Nominalisation and genre in early discourses on electricity

Franklin, Priestley and the Philosophical transactions

| York University

Halliday proposes that a key role in the language of science is played by compacting nominalisation, a strategy by which qualities and processes in one phase of a discourse are then nominalised in a following phase to facilitate the flow of argument. Compacting nominalisation is very characteristic of Priestley’s 1767 The history and present state of electricity. However, another book of the same era and field, Franklin’s 1751–1754 New experiments and observations on electricity, employs little of this strategy. One explanation lies in genre differences. Franklin’s book and accounts of electrical experiments into the Philosophical transactions of the same era are both generically similar to and different from Priestley’s book, quite beyond the issue of compacting nominalisation. Generic similarities and differences are here demonstrated in terms of register values.

Keywords: genre, register, field, tenor, mode, nominalisation, electrical science, Franklin, Priestley, Philosophical transactions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Franklin and Priestley
    • 1.2A previous interpretation of Franklin and Priestley
  • 2.The method of this study
  • 3.The genre analysis
    • 3.1Introduction to genre analysis: field, tenor and mode
    • 3.2Comparative analysis of the two texts
      • 3.2.1Genre typology in the Franklin and Priestley excerpts
      • 3.2.2Field comparison: activity sequences and lexis
      • 3.2.3Tenor comparison: Status, contact and affect
      • 3.2.4Mode comparison: The interpersonal and existential axes
  • 4.Comparable Philosophical Transactions texts: Henry Miles and William Watson
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 29 January 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.00025.cum
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