The Birth of the Academic Article - Le Journal des Sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions 1665-1700 - David Banks
The documents to be used: a corpus
The Birth of the Academic Article - Le Journal des Sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions 1665-1700 - David Banks
David Banks [+]
Universite de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France
David Banks is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France. He is a past Director of ERLA (Equipe de Recherche en Linguistique Appliquée) and a past Chairman of AFLSF (Association Française de la Linguistique Systémique Fonctionnelle). His research interests include the synchronic and diachronic analysis of scientific text, and the application of systemic functional linguistics to French. He has published over 80 academic articles and authored or edited over 20 books. His book The Development of Scientific Writing (2008) won the ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) Language and Linguistics Book Award in 2010.
Description
A selection of issues to be studied was made from the years 1665, 1675, 1685 and 1694 for the Philosophical Transactions and 1695 for the Journal des Sçavans. The total number of words is over 173,000, which constitutes a large corpus given that all the analyses have to be carried out manually. It is seen that the two periodicals differ in terms of genre, and in the range of subjects that are treated. It is also shown that the corpus can be taken as being relatively representative of the two journals in the period 1665-1700.