4 - The passive in nineteenth-century scientific writing

Summary

Introduction

The present study focuses on the use of the passive in nineteenth-century scientific writing as attested in CONCE, A Corpus of Nineteenth-century English (see Kytö, Rudanko and Smitterberg 2000; see also the Introduction to the present volume), and as compared to other genres included in this corpus, namely Debates, Drama, Fiction, History, Letters, and Trials. Samples from Science amount to approximately 100,000 words, which corresponds to 10 per cent of this one-million-word corpus. The corpus samples represent one genre of scientific writing, viz. scientific monographs; some of these monographs contributed to the evolution of science (see the Appendix to the present volume). A corpus comprising authors known as leaders of scientific thinking is essential for the analysis of grammar that characterizes the development of scientific style. The impetus for this study comes from statements that passive forms played a decisive role in the formation of the new impersonal style in scientific English (Bailey 1996: 239; Görlach 1999: 150). In some studies (e.g. Halliday 1988: 166), this formation is described as a recent development dating back to the nineteenth century. The evidence provided by the CONCE corpus may clarify to what extent such claims are justified.

Science deals with objective and impersonal events and entities, and the passive voice is an ideal grammatical form for discourse associated with objectivity and non-involvement. Handbooks on practical English usage point to the frequent occurrence of passives (the agentless passive, in particular) in academic and scientific writing (Swan 1995: 408).