Journal of Historical Pragmatics 13:2 (2012), 313–335. doi 10.1075/jhp.13.2.06hil issn 1566–5852 / e-issn 1569–9854 © John Benjamins Publishing Company So ADJ/ADV that clause patterns in Early Modern English medical writing Turo Hiltunen University of Helsinki his paper investigates how an intensifying phraseological pattern involving the adverb so followed by a delayed declarative content clause is used in medical English in the early modern period (1500–1700). So may occur with adjectival, nominal or adverbial heads, and the pattern is used for indicating degree, extent or manner. he analysis employs the recently published Early Modern English Medical Texts corpus to show (i) that the pattern was in use throughout the entire period, (ii) that it tends to be more frequently used in learned rather than popular texts, and (iii) that it is typically used for giving descriptions and less oten in instructions. Keywords: Early Modern English, medical writing, phraseology, corpus linguistics 1. Introduction Medical science underwent fundamental ideological, material and technological changes in the early modern period (see e.g. Cook 2006; Mikkeli and Marttila 2010). How these developments inluenced medical English is perhaps easiest to observe at the level of vocabulary when new terms are introduced and old ones become obsolete. Likewise, we can name concrete examples where institutional developments have led to changes in discourse forms, such as the birth of the scientiic journal following the establishment of the Royal Society. In contrast, changes of grammar and phraseology are more elusive, and in order to identify them, it is necessary to analyse a large number of texts. Phraseological variation in medical English can be investigated from the per- spective of diachronic pragmatics, outlined in Jacobs and Jucker (1995; see also Traugott and Dasher 2002: 100). his involves identifying speciic linguistic forms, like grammatical patterns, and investigating whether their functions change over