Then and now: A reconsideration of the first corpus of scientific English

The subtitle of Huddleston (1971) reads A syntactic study based on an analysis of scientific texts; this volume thus represents the first carefully designed and substantial corpus of scientific English. In this paper I re-examine a selection of his findings based on the science and engineering half of Hyland's corpus of 240 research articles. Features selected were variation in the passivization of individual transitive verbs, the paucity of instances of V + V-ing structures like "He continued working", and the meaning of the modal must in research prose. In all three cases, Huddleston's findings were largely confirmed in a database constructed about 35 years later, thus suggesting that English research writing in the sciences is, at least in grammatical terms, fundamentally stable. In the closing section, I contrast this linguistic stability with the rapid technological development of corpus linguistics. I instance a recent co-taught experimental course in which international senior doctoral students from the health and social sciences were able, with relatively little training and guidance, to construct paired corpora of their own research writings and of published articles from their own specialities and then conduct precisely the kinds of analysis that only a highly professional linguist could, with considerable more labour, conduct nearly forty years ago.