All Gathered Together on the Construction of Scientific and Technical Books in 15th-Century England (original) (raw)
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The Reference Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose
Proceedings of KONVENS 2012 - The 11th Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2012
This paper presents the current status of the project Reference Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose, which pursues the digital editing of hitherto unedited scientific, particularly medical, manuscripts in late Middle English, as well as the compilation of an annotated corpus. The principles followed for the digital editions and the compilation of the corpus will be explained; the development and application of several specific tools to retrieve linguistic information within the framework of the project will also be discussed. Our work joins in with worldwide initiatives from other research teams devoted to the study of medical and scientific writings in the history of English (see .
The recognition of the leading role of English as the language of science would not have been possible without the concerted efforts of men and women of letters and science who promoted its use, other than as conversational discourse, during the Modern period. Inthis paper, we concentrate on attitudes towards the use of English in this time focusing on material from the period. Primary sources include books from different scientific domains as well as utilitarian prose. One aspect which is relevant to the use of English for science and specialised uses concerns obvious shifts in language style from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Some scholars claim that English for scientific use underwent a drastic change in style from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean period. This appears to involve a plainer style at the expense of the interpersonal in order to reduce subjectivity. We argue, however, that this does not seem to be the case in the texts selected for analysis. We think that, despite obvious changes in style to reduce superfluous verbosity, interpersonal strategies are still necessarily used. Our ultimate objective is to demonstrate the legitimacy of English to convey scientific thought as demonstrated by contemporary writers and translators.
At close range: prefaces and other text types in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing
What we nowadays term " front matter " was conceived of in the past as a direct address to the reader. Over time, standard formulae were developed and certain rhetorical devices consolidated. Late modern authors were familiar with the highly conventionalised patterns of prefaces and dedications and employed their " discursive freedom " in their scientific works even though the style used for the transmission of scientific knowledge was also changing and being standardised. This paper revolves precisely around the either parallel or divergent development of prefaces to scientific works and the body of the texts themselves. In order to study such evolutions we have analysed samples written by women between 1700 and 1900 in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The scrutiny of some linguistic elements generally admitted to express involvement have rendered a decline in the use of involvement features but we assume that frequency of use of the same features should be different in both prefaces and actual works. Unexpectedly, the overall frequency of these features is higher in the texts than in their corresponding prefaces.
Studies in Bibliography, 2000
Having been called to review the contribution to English studies of his late friend and fellow bibliographer Ronald Brunless McKerrow, Sir Walter Wilson Greg observed that "the whole significance of his teaching" lay in "the importance he attached to the derivations of the text.". McKerrow's celebrated Introduction to Bibliography (first published in 1927) considers the investigation of the mechanics of printing chiefly as a means to illuminate the question of how nearly a printed book may represent the author's original manuscript. The opening of the third part of the Introduction clearly states the raison d'être of the volume: All that has been written hitherto in this book has been, or should have been, directed, immediately or remotely, to the elucidation of the single problem of the relation between the text of a printed book and the original MS. of its author. It is interesting to note, however, that the discussion of this topic occupies only a slender section of the book, covering a total of twenty-five pages. But the reason McKerrow dealt with the subject at all is essentially that his mind was never content to rest on what was already a great achievement. He was able to use the occasion of the 1928 reprint of his Introduction to make "a few corrections and small additions" (p. viii), while his election as the prestigious Sandars Reader in Bibliography in 1928 allowed him to explore at length the textual questions he had sketched out in the book.
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NJES: Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2017
This paper provides an overview of the Corpus of History English Texts, one of the component parts of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (Moskowich and Crespo 2012), looking in particular at the communicative formats that it contains. Among the defining characteristics of the Coruña Corpus are that it is diachronic in nature, and that it can be considered either as a single-or multi-genre corpus, according to the theoretical tenets adopted (Kytö 2010; McEnery and Hardie 2013). The corpus has been designed as a tool for the study of language change in English scientific writing in general, and more specifically in the different scientific disciplines which have been sampled in each subcorpus. All the texts compiled were published between 1700 and 1900, thus offering a thorough view of late Modern English scientific discourse, a period often neglected in English historical studies (De Smet 2005). The analysis of this variety of English is also useful as a means of achieving a clear and detailed description of the origins of English as " the language of science " .
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The Organisation and Structure of Old English Encyclopaedic Notes
Filologia Germanica / Germanic Philology, 2013
La rivista si avvale di un sistema di refereeing anonimo. I contributi proposti per la pubblicazione, una volta selezionati dal Comitato Scientifico, vengono sottoposti al giudizio di almeno due revisori anonimi, italiani e/o stranieri, scelti sulla base di specifiche competenze disciplinari. Ogni anno vengono pubblicati i nomi dei revisori che hanno collaborato alla valutazione dei contributi del numero precedente. Per il numero 4 (2012) hanno svolto questa funzione la Prof. Gianna Chiesa Isnardi (Genova) e la Prof. Carla Cucina (Macerata).
The Royal Society Corpus 6.0: Providing 300+ Years of Scientific Writing for Humanistic Study
2020
We present a new, extended version of the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), a diachronic corpus of scientific English now covering 300+ years of scientific writing (1665--1996). The corpus comprises 47 837 texts, primarily scientific articles, and is based on publications of the Royal Society of London, mainly its Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings. The corpus has been built on the basis of the FAIR principles and is freely available under a Creative Commons license, excluding copy-righted parts. We provide information on how the corpus can be found, the file formats available for download as well as accessibility via a web-based corpus query platform. We show a number of analytic tools that we have implemented for better usability and provide an example of use of the corpus for linguistic analysis as well as examples of subsequent, external uses of earlier releases. We place the RSC against the background of existing English diachronic/scientific corpora, elaborating on its value...