Scientific discourse across history : A combined multi-dimensional/rhetorical analysis of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London

Social scientists have repeatedly called on one another to combine diverse methods of inquiry in attempting to understand social phenomena. Apart from its use in ethnographic and case study research, however, this theoretically desirable approach to social science research has not often been applied. In an attempt to do so, the present study employed methods from two differing disciplines of language study, rhetorical analysis and sociolinguistic register analysis, to gain a fuller understanding of the development of scientific research writing over the last 300 years. It undertakes an integrated linguistic and rhetorical analysis of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (PTRS) from 1675 to 1975, as it has evolved into the modern scientific journal it is today. Sociolinguistic register analysis, as used in the present study, is a powerful form of quantitative discourse analysis.