Then and now: A reconsideration of the first corpus of scientific English
2004; Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Espanhol
ISSN
2340-2784
Autores Tópico(s)Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies
ResumoespanolEl subtitulo del libro de Huddleston (1971) dice A syntactic study based on an analysis of scientific texts; este volumen, por lo tanto, representa el primer corpus cuidadosamente disenado e importante de ingles cientifico. En este articulo me propongo reexaminar algunos de sus resultados basandome en la mitad del corpus de Hyland de 240 articulos de investigacion. Las variables seleccionadas han sido la variacion que existe en la frecuencia de voz pasiva en los verbos transitivos, la escasez de casos en que se producen estructuras V + V-ing, como en He continued working, y en el significado del verbo modal must en la prosa de investigacion. En los tres casos, la mayoria de los hallazgos de Huddleston han sido confirmados mediante una base de datos construida unos 35 anos mas tarde, por lo que se deduce que la escritura del ingles cientifico es, al menos en terminos gramaticales, fundamentalmente estable. En la seccion final, establezco un contraste entre esta estabilidad linguistica con el rapido desarrollo tecnologico de la linguistica del corpus. Pongo como ejemplo un curso experimental que he compartido con estudiantes de un programa de doctorado pertenecientes a las areas de la salud y de las ciencias sociales. Estos estudiantes pudieron, con una relativa minima direccion y preparacion, construir corpus paralelos de sus propios trabajos de investigacion y de articulos publicados en sus especialidades, y a continuacion realizar precisamente el tipo de analisis que solo un linguista altamente cualificado podria producir, con una cantidad considerablemente superior de trabajo, casi cuarenta anos antes EnglishThe subtitle of Huddleston (1971) reads A syntactic study based on an analysis of scientific texts; this volume thus represents the first carefully designed and substantial corpus of scientific English. In this paper I re-examine a selection of his findings based on the science and engineering half of Hyland's corpus of 240 research articles. Features selected were variation in the passivization of individual transitive verbs, the paucity of instances of V + V-ing structures like He continued working, and the meaning of the modal must in research prose. In all three cases, Huddleston's findings were largely confirmed in a database constructed about 35 years later, thus suggesting that English research writing in the sciences is, at least in grammatical terms, fundamentally stable. In the closing section, I contrast this linguistic stability with the rapid technological development of corpus linguistics. I instance a recent co-taught experimental course in which international senior doctoral students from the health and social sciences were able, with relatively little training and guidance, to construct paired corpora of their own research writings and of published articles from their own specialities and then conduct precisely the kinds of analysis that only a highly professional linguist could, with considerable more labour, conduct nearly forty years ago
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