Make plus Adjective in Eighteenth-Century Science and Fiction: Some Issues Made Public

Abstract

[Abstract] Make plus adjective or noun structures are often used by speakers of English. Nevertheless, the first have not been, to our understanding, as thoroughly studied as the latter and less so in non-everyday language. The aim of this paper is to provide a preliminary study and compare the behaviour of make plus adjective collocations (such as make clear) as they were used by eighteenth-century scientists and fiction writers. To this end we will use part of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing, (CC) being presently compiled in A Coruña University (Spain), and an equivalent number of words produced by English-speaking fiction writers.

Section 2 briefly presents the particular structure in focus. In section 3 we will revise the relation between genre and discursive patterns and preferred structures in scientific writing. Section 4 will be devoted to the presentation of our material and the analysis of the data gathered from it. A summary and some conclusions will be presented in section 5.