‘Woman observes, man reasons’: the presence of abstract reasoning in men’s and women’s nineteenth-century scientific texts from the Coruña Corpus

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract The increasingly popular research on the discourse of men and women that had emerged in the second part of the twentieth century gave rise to a number of generalisations, such as the assumption that women tend to use language to prioritise community relationships and cooperation, while men use it with the aim of asserting dominance and control (Romaine 1996: 117). Similarly, it has been affirmed that women’s discourse is usually less detached, more personal, more tentative and more narrative than male, whereas the latter tends to have a more direct, abstract and informational character (see Lakoff 1990; Biber & Burges 2000; Argamon et al. 2003). From a diachronic perspective, Geisler’s (2003) multidimensional study of nineteenth-century letters confirms that men’s language and women’s language differ along several dimensions of variation, the former tending towards abstractness and elaboration, and the latter towards involvement and a certain degree of persuasiveness. However, when comparing scientific and non-scientific prose written by nineteenth-century women, Crespo (2019) demonstrated that female historians tended to write in a more objective and impersonal way than their non-scientist sisters, thus reflecting a general trend of the evolving – and predominantly male – scientific writing that bloomed in the late modern period (Halliday 1988; Taavitsainen 1994; Atkinson 1999). In this study, we intend to compare the language of men and women nineteenth-century scientists in order to measure the levels of ‘abstraction’, or abstract reasoning, in their writings. Scientific discourse has often been described as containing certain linguistic features that make it abstract or impersonal (Bazerman 1988; Hyland 1998; Gotti 2003). In a pioneering multidimensional analysis performed on a large corpus containing a wide range of English registers, Biber (1988) showed that passive constructions, conjuncts and certain adverbial subordinators are typically found in academic prose, thus making it more abstract. This was later confirmed in subsequent multidimensional analyses that were restricted to scientific registers, some replicating Biber’s dimensions (Conrad 1996), and some yielding new dimensions (Gray 2011; Monaco 2017). Considering the institutionalised prejudice against women scientists (and women in general) in the patriarchal world of the late modern period, expressed by Rousseau (1762) in his doubt as to whether women are capable of abstract reasoning, our aim is to analyse texts of female scientists in order to find out whether they reach the same level of abstraction in their writings as their male colleagues. To this end, we are using data from the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (Moskowich & Crespo 2007; Crespo & Moskowich 2020), a diachronic corpus of scientific texts published between 1700 and 1900, arranged in different subcorpora, each subcorpus corresponding to a specific scientific discipline. On this occasion, we will be looking at texts from nineteenth-century History and Life Sciences, using Monaco’s (2017) multidimensional analysis as a methodological basis and a reference – specifically, Dimension 3, characterised by the presence of passive constructions and nominalisations. The ultimate aim of this article is to evaluate the metalinguistic strategies used by male and female nineteenth-century scientists in order to spot subregister variation, by applying variables such as scientific discipline, sex of the author and genre.