The Conventionalization of the Passive in Late Modern Scientific English

Abstract

[Abstract] This paper is part of a larger project in which I seek to find out the reasons behind the radical decrease in the use of passives in Present-day English scientific discourse. After discarding a number of linguistic factors, my hypothesis is that passives are being elided because they have lost the pragmatic function which justified their high frequency in scientific discourse; they have become conventionalised in this text-type and, as any other linguistic feature which does not have a clear function in informative writing, are being suppressed. This paper tries to check this hypothesis by analysing the function of passives in scientific discourse before the change started to take place, that is, in Late Modern English. With data from ARCHER and other sources I will try to show that passives in LModE scientific English exemplify the conventionalisation of pragmatic strategies, a scenario that inevitably leads to linguistic change.