To browse Academia. Apart from the practical function of efficiently exchanging knowledge, scientific writing is also used to convey persuasion by using a number of pragmatic strategies that help authors gain acceptance for their claims. Such strategies include the acknowledgment of other authors and their opinions, politeness directed towards the reader, and hedging, this is, the mitigation of certain claims that may otherwise sound too categorical by means of various linguistic devices, among them, modal verbs.
Variables such as scientific discipline, genre, sex and origin of the author, as well as date of publication have been considered in the analysis. Iria Bello Viruega. The aim of this paper is to study the sex variable in the use of nominalizations, a well-known marker of scientific register, in scientific texts written in English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to delve into whether we can identify differences in the use of nominalizations in the writings of female and male scientists of that time.
The paper is structured in four parts. Section One provides an account of the situation of women scientists in the late modern period, encompassing and analysis of their situation in the academia and their consideration for intellectual activities. Section Two is concerned with scientific register, female writing styles and nominalizations. In Section Three the corpus and methodology used for this study are presented.
This is followed in Section Four by an analysis of data. In the last section, conclusions and suggestion for further research are offered. Keywords: English scientific register, nominalizations, female writing, historical sociolin-guistics, descriptive linguistics.
Isabel Moskowich. This paper addresses the issue of lexical density and its popularity after the arrival of corpus linguistics and its methodology. In fact, this is now one of the most frequently used descriptive tools in the analysis of register and genre. Researchers have often trusted lexical density as it is quantifiable and measurable by applying a formula and this has made its use very popular both for scrutinising grammatical and lexical forms and their frequencies.
