Intensification in Eighteenth Century Medical Writing
| Autor: | Turo Hiltunen |
|---|---|
| Přispěvatelé: | English Philology |
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
050101 languages & linguistics
Linguistics and Language 05 social sciences Interpersonal communication Medical writing Language and Linguistics Linguistics 3. Good health 030507 speech-language pathology & audiology 03 medical and health sciences 6121 Languages 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Sociology 0305 other medical science |
| Zdroj: | Journal of English Linguistics. 49:90-113 |
| ISSN: | 1552-5457 0075-4242 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/0075424220982649 |
| Popis: | While intensifiers are primarily associated with informal spoken registers, they serve important interpersonal functions also in more formal registers like academic prose. The use of intensifiers in scientific writing has accordingly been explored in Present-Day English, and previous studies have also investigated diachronic changes in this register in Middle and Early Modern English. However, the Late Modern English period remains largely unexplored, despite the fact that at least in medical writing it represents an important transition period both intellectually and textually. To follow up on the trends and developments established in previous work, this paper explores the patterns of intensification in eighteenth century medical writing using Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT; Taavitsainen et al. 2019), which contains a large collection of texts representing different areas of medicine. While the intensifiers that are selected for study are ubiquitous in the data, their frequency varies considerably between individual texts, and this variation is often linked to the characteristics of individual sub-registers. At the same time, the use of intensifiers in this period is characterized by stability rather than dramatic change, despite ongoing changes in the sociocultural context of medicine. Along with providing a detailed investigation of the frequency of the main intensifiers in different categories of medical writing of the period, the analysis describes their co-selection patterns with particular adjectives. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
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