Use of complex predicates in 19th century English-language astronomy writings. Exploitation of the Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy
Keywords:
collocation, complex predicate, corpus linguistics, scientific writing, sociolinguistic variablesAbstract
The corpus-based study presented here examines the use of make-complex predicates in nineteenth-century Astronomy. The texts analysed have been taken from the first published section of the Coruña Corpus, the Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA), compiled by the MuStE group. The concept of complex predicate applied to this study is the one explained by Cattell (1984). As the cor- pus includes extralinguistic information, complex predicates have been analysed applying three different parameters: time-span, origin of the authors and genre or text-type. Taking into account the first parameter, an increase in the use of make-complex predicates from the beginning to the end of the century has been observed; as regards origin, authors from North America made a wider use of these constructions than the ones educated in Europe. Within the European group, texts belonging to Scottish authors arouse the highest number of these collocations followed by England and Ireland. Text-types analysis shows that more specialised text-types tended to use a lower number of complex predicates but essays and articles present similar results as letters, a less specialised genre. Finally, morphological aspects of these complex predicates show that in a great number of examples the noun involved in the complex predicate was used in plural and that a 46.1% of the tokens found had an isomorphic related verb. Further research will focus on the use of complex predicates and the related verbs in the corpus. Data obtained will be compared to the ones found in eigh- teenth-century Astronomy texts to reach conclusions that might be extrapolated to scientific language in general.
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