Abstract
Scientific writings, as one essential part of human culture, have evolved over centuries into their current form. Knowing how scientific writings evolved is particularly helpful in understanding how trends in scientific culture developed. It also allows us to better understand how scientific culture was interwoven with human culture generally. The availability of massive digitized texts and the progress in computational technologies today provide us with a convenient and credible way to discern the evolutionary patterns in scientific writings by examining the diachronic linguistic changes. The linguistic changes in scientific writings reflect the genre shifts that took place with historical changes in science and scientific writings. This study investigates a general evolutionary linguistic pattern in scientific writings. It does so by merging two credible computational methods: relative entropy; word-embedding concreteness and imageability. It thus creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes in the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (PTRS, 1665–1869). The data from two computational approaches can be well mapped to support the argument that this journal followed the evolutionary trend of increasing professionalization and specialization. But it also shows that language use in this journal was greatly influenced by historical events and other socio-cultural factors. This study, as a “culturomic” approach, demonstrates that the linguistic evolutionary patterns in scientific discourse have been interrupted by external factors even though this scientific discourse would likely have cumulatively developed into a professional and specialized genre. The approaches proposed by this study can make a great contribution to full-text analysis in scientometrics.
Highlights
Discerning the patterns of cultural evolution is obviously crucial to gaining a better understanding of both human nature and how the world has formed and changed (Shennan 2009)
The diachronic trend in scientific discourse can be represented in linguistic data and can be detected through measuring the changes of relative entropy and linguistic concreteness/imageability
The first result concerns the changes of lemmas and POS trigrams in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (PTRS) and it refers to changes of relative entropy
Summary
Discerning the patterns of cultural evolution is obviously crucial to gaining a better understanding of both human nature and how the world has formed and changed (Shennan 2009). The evolution of specific cultural phenomena can be investigated quantitatively with the development of computational technology and by drawing on the increasing amount of digitalized materials (Carr et al 2017; Hutchison et al 2018) These studies have helped to establish a quantitative science of cultural change and have provided insights into the evolutionary patterns in human culture. Biber and Gray (2016) analyze historical changes in the grammatical complexity of academic writing by comparing their changes of frequencies Their finding is that academic writings are often surprisingly imprecise, which was due to the loss of meaning that came with the use of compressed rather than elaborated formulations. Banks (2008) adopts a similar frequency-based quantitative method to investigate the linguistic changes in the PTRS (1700–1980) One of his findings is that nominalization has been continuously increasing in the PTRS (1700–1980). There are other measures for investigating historical linguistic changes
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