69 18 th century scientific writing: A study of make complex predicates in the Coruña Corpus 1 Ines Lareo, Universidade da Coruña María José Esteve Ramos, Universitat Jaume I Abstract Complex predicates formed by the verb make plus a noun are suitable for being studied historically with very interesting results, as it was observed in previous literature. However, our interest lies in tracing, comparing and understanding what may be the variation of these constructions in scientific writing, and in their different chronological layers, analysing different scientific disciplines included in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC hereafter). As this proves to be a long-term objective, the aim of this paper is to study the use of complex predicates in only one of these disciplines. To this end, some texts included in the 18 th century Life Sciences discipline of the CC have been analy- sed. Linguistic and extralinguistic information has been taken into account. Finally, the use of complex predicates and related verbs made by the scientists in question has been compared. 1 Introduction This paper presents our first approach to the study of some analytical structures formed by the verb make plus noun in some selected 18 th century scientific texts taken from the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC). Our final aim is to observe the use of these constructions made by scientists when they report or describe the result of their observations. However, since the CC is an ongoing project, only partial results based on the Life Sciences discipline can be pre- sented in this study. The paper has been divided into different sections devoted to the following points. Section 2 includes some comments on the corpus itself; section 3 deals with the construction make plus noun and its historical development and section 4 encompasses two subsections that show the results obtained after applying extralinguistic and linguistic criteria. Finally, section 5 has been devoted to the