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Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse
Edited by Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 330] 2022
► pp. 79–104

Chapter 4
Medical discourse in Late Modern English

Insights from a multidisciplinary corpus of scientific journal articles

| Saarland University

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.

Keywords: Late Modern English, corpus development, register analysis, specialized academic corpora, written English medical discourse, Royal Society Corpus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The RSC 6.0
  • 3.Late Modern English medical texts in the RSC
    • 3.1Authors of medical texts
    • 3.2RSC texts with medical implications
    • 3.3Linguistic features of medical articles
  • 4.Summary and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.330.04men
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