Eighteenth-Century Scientific Writing in the Coruña Corpus: English "Cultivated by Industrious and Good Hands"

Abstract

This paper aims at comparing the use of classical terms in eighteenth scientific writing in English once the patterns of Scholasticism have been abandoned and the new methods brought about by Empiricism are settled. The paper will focus on how two different disciplines, Philosophy as a representative of the Humanities, and Life Sciences, representing the observational sciences, make use of such forms as an indicator of their links to the past as well as one of the discursive traditions typical of each. The data to carry out this analysis will be taken from two subcorpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing, namely, the Corpus of English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT) and the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts (CELiST). Both quantitative and qualitative methods will be used.