At close range: prefaces and other text types in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing

Abstract

What we nowadays term “front matter” was conceived of in the past as a direct address to the reader. Over time, standard formulae were developed and certain rhetorical devices consolidated. Late modern authors were familiar with the highly conventionalised patterns of prefaces and dedications and employed their “discursive freedom” in their scientific works even though the style used for the transmission of scientific knowledge was also changing and being standardised. This paper revolves precisely around the either parallel or divergent development of prefaces to scientific works and the body of the texts themselves. In order to study such evolutions we have analysed samples written by women between 1700 and 1900 in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The scrutiny of some linguistic elements generally admitted to express involvement have rendered a decline in the use of involvement features but we assume that frequency of use of the same features should be different in both prefaces and actual works. Unexpectedly, the overall frequency of these features is higher in the texts than in their corresponding prefaces.