Nominalizations and Female Scientific Writing in the Late Modern Period

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the sex variable in the use of nominalizations, a wellknown marker of scientific register, in scientific texts written in English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to delve into whether we can identify differences in the use of nominalizations in the writings of female and male scientists of that time. The paper is structured in four parts. Section One provides an account of the situation of women scientists in the late modern period, encompassing and analysis of their situation in the academia and their consideration for intellectual activities. Section Two is concerned with scientific register, female writing styles and nominalizations. In Section Three the corpus and methodology used for this study are presented. This is followed in Section Four by an analysis of data. In the last section, conclusions and suggestion for further research are offered.