“To Lerne Sciences Touching Nombres and Proporciouns”: The Proportion of Affixation in Early Scientific Writing

Abstract

[Abstract] [Abstract] The study of scientific lexicon from the point of view of derivational morphology does not demonstrate any great advance in the vernacularisation process at the end of the fourteenth century. Rather, it shows how English scientific writing adopted vocabulary from other languages although the combination of bases and affixes of different provenance cannot be attested yet. In other words, terms were adopted as whole entities, because the addressed readership was not yet credited with the resources to understand them as analysable structures. As a consequence, it took time before smaller units were assimilated as reusable elements to create hybrid formations. As Wood states “the patterns of discourse in science are provided by the patterns of argument in science, which is given by the structure of the discipline itself”. On the basis of the results of our analysis, we can also argue that these same patterns of discourse supply the patterns of derivational morphology in written science. Moreover, scientific writing acts as a response to “the changing needs of the audience”. In our study, we have observed that the patterns of derivative morphology, applied not only in each discipline but also in each text layer, conform to the needs of the readership. Texts can, therefore, be ascribed different levels of informativeness according to their settings or context: “texts occur and are understood in their discourse settings […] which are necessarily engaged in interpretations”.The readership's command of morphological devices can be viewed as one of the extra-textual settings of the samples under survey. Finally, it is claimed that, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, “discrimination of social class could be made in English by knowledge of the terms of particular fields of discourse considered appropriate to a gentleman.” Both the development of the scientific disciplines and the readership's command of particular linguistic devices (morphology in this case) can be treated as part of the settings we consider strategies indexical of in-group markedness.