Focalization processes in late Modern English scientific register
Keywords:
focus operators, focalization, scalarity, pragmatic scales, historical sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, English scientific register, Late Modern EnglishAbstract
Languages have various resources to highlight information within discourse and focalization is one of them. According to the principle of the final focus (Quirk & Greenbaum, 1973; Downing & Locke, 2006), the last member of a statement is also the most informative. This degree of informativeness can also be marked through focus operators. Several experimental studies point to the importance of these units as regulators in information processing (Loureda et al., 2015, Nadal et al., 2017, Cruz & Loureda, 2019).
There are studies on operators from perspective of the writer/speaker, both from a descriptive (König, 1991, Dimroth & Klein, 1996, Traugott, 1996) and contrastive perspectives (Bouma, Hendricks & Hoeksema, 2007, Gast & van der Auwera, 2011, Gast, 2017a). Within corpus linguistics, its use has been studied in general corpora (Gast, 2006, Traugott, Gast & Rzymski, 2015, Gast 2017b). However, little attention has yet been paid to their use in specialized registers (and corpora). The objective of this study is to analyze the use of different focus operators (also, even, only, too, as well) in various subcorpora of the Coruña Corpus (Moskowich & Crespo García, 2007, Moskowich & Parapar López, 2008, Crespo García & Moskowich, 2010, 2020), a corpus specialized in the development of the scientific register in English in the late modern period. Four subcorpora were selected. They correspond to the disciplines of astronomy (CETA, Moskowich, Lareo, Camiña Rioboo & Crespo 2012), philosophy (CEPhiT, Moskowich, Camiña Rioboo, Lareo & Crespo, 2016), history (CHET, Moskowich, Lareo, Lojo Sandino & Sánchez Barreiro, 2019), and life sciences (CELiST, Lareo, Monaco, Esteve-Ramos, Moskowich, 2021). The diachronic character of the corpus, which covers the period of consolidation of the scientific register in English (18th and 19th centuries), provides a new dimension not yet explored in the study of focus operators. Likewise, the sociolinguistic orientation of the corpus allows the inclusion of extralinguistic variables (sex and place of education of the author, as well as text type), which, together with the study of linguistic variables, have allowed conclusions to be drawn about the use of focus operators in late Modern English scientific register.
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