The Development of Scientific Writing: Linguistic Features and Historical Context

Cover
Contents
Author’s note
Introduction
	Diachronic study of scientific text
	Systemic Functional Linguistics – a suitable framework
	Thematic structure
	Grammatical metaphor
	Michael Halliday
	This study
Part 1
Chapter 1
	Where it all began
	The passive
	Personal pronouns
	Nominalisation
Chapter 2
	A troubled period
	Francis Bacon
	Robert Boyle
	Henry Power and Robert Hooke
	Experimental and descriptive sciences
Chapter 3
	The place of the Royal Society and its Philosophical Transactions
	Newton
	Newton and the influence of Latin
	Newton and Huygens
Part 2
Chapter 4
	Two centuries of increasing nominalisation
	The corpus
Chapter 5
	Increasing use of passives
	Passives and process types
Chapter 6
	A rare phenomenon
	The eighteenth century situation
	Continuation in the nineteenth century
	The twentieth century: a radical change
Chapter 7
	Nominalising processes
	Experiment
	Nominalized processes as Modifiers
Chapter 8
	Motivation for the passive
	The grammatical functions of topical themes
	Textual Themes
	Interpersonal Themes
	Thematic progression
Chapter 9
	A typology of Themes
	Minor types of Theme
	Features of the experiment
	The human element
	Textual reference
	Mathematics
An Interpersonal coda
	Ancients and Moderns
	Epistolary framing
	Praise
	Criticism
	Community
	Provenance
	Referencing
	Changing patterns of referring
By way of conclusion
	The story so far
	Envoi
Notes
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
References
Author Index
Subject Index