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Nominalisation and genre in early discourses on electricity
Franklin, Priestley and the Philosophical transactions
- Source: Language, Context and Text, Volume 2, Issue 1, Jan 2020, p. 171 - 186
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- 29 Jan 2020
Abstract
Abstract
Halliday proposes that a key role in the language of science is played by compacting nominalisation, a strategy by which qualities and processes in one phase of a discourse are then nominalised in a following phase to facilitate the flow of argument. Compacting nominalisation is very characteristic of Priestley’s 1767The history and present state of electricity. However, another book of the same era and field, Franklin’s 1751–1754 New experiments and observations on electricity, employs little of this strategy. One explanation lies in genre differences. Franklin’s book and accounts of electrical experiments into the Philosophical transactions of the same era are both generically similar to and different from Priestley’s book, quite beyond the issue of compacting nominalisation. Generic similarities and differences are here demonstrated in terms of register values.