Conditonals and verb-forms in Nineteenth-Century life sciences texts Luis Miguel Puente Castelo luis.pcastelo@udc.es Begoña Crespo García bcrespo@udc.es Acknowledgments: The research here reported on has been funded by the Consellería de Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (I2C plan, reference number Pre/2011/096, co-funded 80% by the European Social Fund) and the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO), grant number FFI2013- 42215-P. These grants are hereby gratefully acknowledged. Corpus Linguistcs 2015 Lancaster, 21-24 July 2015 htp://www.udc.es/grupos/muste Screenshot of the Coruña Corpus Tool Conclusions: -The data show that the majority of conditonals used in the corpus are not canonical (only 27.90%). -However, the use of canonical conditonals was higher (though decreasing) in the 19th century than in the 20th. -Women authors tend to use more canonical conditonals than male. They are also more common in Lectures and leters and among North American writers. -Further research is needed in order to explain these infuences, although, the higher uses of canonical conditonals seem to be linked to more conservatve models of language. Conditonals and verb forms: Traditonal typologies (EFL grammars) - used the combinaton of verb forms to distnguish three diferent types of conditonals, in increasing level of hypothetcality, also known as “canonical conditonals”  1st type: If + present simple... will...  2nd type: If + past simple... would...  3rd type: If + past perfect... would perfect infnitve... Critcism: -Oversimplifed classifcaton to make conditonals easy to learn for learners of English as a Foreign Language -Ignores all the other combinatons of tenses and modals -Considers only conditonals expressing a relatonship of likelihood between consttuents -Not refectve of the versatlity of uses of conditonals. (Hwang 1979, Maule 1988, Fulcher 1991, Ferguson 2001, Jones & Waller 2010). Traditonal typologies do not refect the richness of uses of conditonal structures, PARTICULARLY IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING. Corpus: Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts (CELiST) = part of Coruña Corpus of English Scientfc Writng (CC) Crespo & Moskowich 2010, Moskowich 2011. -20 c.10,000-word samples covering period 1800-1900. -203,422 words. -representatve of the discipline in the period. -samples selected taking into account variables: Sex, genre, origin of the author Bibliography: Carter-Thomas, Shirley & Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet. 2008. “If-conditonals in medical discourse: from theory to disciplinary practce”. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7: 191-205. Crespo, Begoña & Isabel Moskowich. 2010. “CETA in the Context of the Coruña Corpus”. Literary and Linguistc Computng 25/2: 153-164. Ferguson, Gibson. 2001. “If you pop over there: a corpus-based study of conditonals in medical discourse”. English for Specifc Purposes 20: 61-82. Fulcher, Glenn. 1991. “Conditonals revisited”. ELT Journal 45: 164-168. Hwang, Myong Ok. 1979. A semantc and syntactc analysis of if-conditonals. Unpublished MA thesis. University of California Los Angeles. Jones, Christan & Daniel Waller. 2010. “If only it were true: the problem with the four conditonals”. ELT Journal. doi: 10.1093/elt/ccp101 Maule, David. 1988. “"Sorry, but if he comes, I go": Teaching conditonals”. ELT Journal 42: 117-123. Moskowich, Isabel. 2011. ““The golden rule of divine philosophy” exemplifed in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientfc Writng”. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específcos 17: 167-197. Moskowich, Isabel & Javier Parapar. 2008. “Writng science, compiling science: The Coruña Corpus of English Scientfc Writng”. In María Jesús Lorenzo Modia (ed.) Proceedings from the 31st AEDEAN Conference. 531-544. A Coruña: Universidade da Coruña. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geofrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Analysis of the results: —There are 80 diferent combina tons of verb-forms. —The percentage of canonical conditonals is higher than in Ferguson’s (2001) and Carter-Thomas & Rowley-Jolivet’s analysis: 27.90% The single most used combinaton is present simple + present simple: 17.68% of the uses. Among “Others”: past simple + present simple, account for 5.29% of the total cases. —Women use more canonical conditonals than men (35.11% vs. 25.37%). Men use almost as many present + present conditonals (22.76%) as canonical conditonals. —Lectures and Leters show a higher proporton of canonical conditonals (both 38%), Textbooks present a 44% of present + present conditonals. —North American authors use the highest proporton of canonical conditonals (41.66%), Irish and Scotsh the lowest (12.5% and 13.3%). —The diachronic evoluton shows a tendency towards a lower use of canonical conditonals, but also a lower use of Others conditonals. Present simple + Present simple conditonals are the ones showing the most important increase. Canonical Type 3 conditonals and past + past conditonals are litle used throughout the period. Combinaton of tenses Carter-Thomas & Rowley- Jolivet (2008: 196) Ferguson (2001: 70) Canonical 1 (present+will) 7.5% 11% Canonical 2 (past+would) 5.9% 6% Canonical 3 (past perfect+ would perfect infnitve) 1.3% 1% Total canonical 14.7% 18% Present + Other modals 17.2% 28% Past + Other modals 4.5% 6% Present + Present 21.3% 21% Past + Past 25.8% 10% Other combinatons 16.5% 17% Total non canonical 85.3% 82% Previous studies: Ferguson (2001) and Carter-Thomas & Rowley-Jolivet (2008) -Corpora of medical writng -The three canonical conditonals, combined, account for only 18% and 14.7%, respectvely, as shown in the Table below: Present+present conditonals, by themselves account for a higher proporton than the three canonical conditonals combined. Was the situaton similar in the nineteenth century? Aims: To describe the diferent combinatons of tenses and modals in nineteenth century academic writng, using life-sciences texts as a sample. To check whether canonical types are more or less used in nineteenth century academic writng than in twenteth century academic writng. Period of study: 1800-1900 •Variables: Time Genre Sex Geographical origin Methodology: -Query for Selected partcles (Quirk et al. 1985) → Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT) (Moskowich & Parapar 2008) -Manual disambiguaton to eliminate all non- conditonal uses. -Classifcaton of the verb forms of all conditonal structures. -non fnite forms, verbless clauses, and conditonals with no apodosis are included in the results. View publication stats View publication stats