Women scientific discourse: compiling a corpus, analysing the language
Begoña Crespo
University A Coruña, Spain
English scientific discourse has been generally studied from the perspective of male works as were men only those who have been considered to shape the history of science. In the last decades, however, women have been gaining recognition as active participants in scientific development, not only from the perspective of individual outstanding scientists but as being part of the epistemic community. On these grounds, a small team of researchers, part of the bigger MuStE group (Research Group for Multidimensional Corpus-based Studies in English), have been working on the compilation of female scientific production exclusively written between 1700 and 1930. Their lives have also been recorded as different sociolinguistics variables could play a part in the selection of authors to carry out linguistic analyses. As this is a work in progress, the compilation process and the principles followed so far will be explained as well as some of the results obtained from pilot studies.