Linking ideas in women’s writing: evidence from the Coruña Corpus

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of some rhetorical devices found in scientific works by late Modern English women. We will focus on apparently marginal linguistic elements as devices fundamental for the expression of logical reasoning in different disciplines. We have based our study on four subcorpora in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing, so that the behaviour and distribution of rhetorical devices will be studied at a microscopic level and attending not only to how they appear in each discipline, but also taking into consideration elements such as time and genre. Our conclusions are limited but we observe the effort women made at a moment when their role in society was not related to knowledge. In general there is an overall increase in the frequency of features typical of an abstract style as well as an increase of conjuncts and adverbial subordinators as linking devices.

Keywords

• Coruña Corpus
• abstraction
• logical reasoning
• female writing
• scientific English
• late Modern English