Language change in scientific discourse

Halliday has demonstrated that changes in discourse function covary with changes in the grammatical resources a language makes available to construe discourse. Specifically, he outlined the ways in which nominalisation evolved as a resource for construing scientific reality as a world of logical relations among abstract entities. In the present article, Halliday’s theory of the scientific text as process will be outlined. The founding principle of this theory, how grammatical metaphor has introduced changes in scientific English, will be illustrated through analysis of selected lexical items and semantic relations.

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