CETA as a tool for the study of Modern Astronomy in English

Abstract

[Abstract] Modern culture can be said to depend on writing to such an extent that if scientific knowledge is not written it simply does not exist (Hyland, 1998). It is easy to observe, when glancing through any more or less old book, that conventions and practices have been subject to change, but such changes are not necessarily random. Hyland (1998: 18) claims that “The conventional linguistic practices for expounding and securing support for scientific knowledge are historical artefacts which date from the 1600s”. And some scholars of the time saw it necessary to establish such discursive rules (as Boyle and his colleagues did when they proposed to separate the exposition of hypotheses and that of proven facts). As a consequence of the application of such discursive patterns, a particular reading public appeared. The subtle negotiation of knowledge that may be observed from the seventeenth century onwards as never before in history is therefore reflected in language and discourse as a vehicle for such negotiation. Compiling a corpus of scientific writing in Modern English seems a plausible idea as a means to study the development of the English language as well as the development of Science. The Project Coruña Corpus: A Collection of Samples for the Historical Study of English Scientific Writing includes texts of a scientific character belonging to different fields of knowledge. The corpus has been conceived of as a collection of sub-corpora, one for each scientific discipline. The Coruña Corpus (CC) is a long- term project that will be coming out little by little, its first part being the Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA).