Thematic Structure and Progression in Some Late Seventeenth-Century French Texts

Abstract

The Journal des Scavans was published for the first time on 5 January 1665. It was the first periodical publication of an academic nature in a vernacular language. It was followed two months later, on 6 March 1665, by the Philosophical Transactions. Both of these publications still exist, so they are of particular interest in the history of academic writing (Banks 2009). For several years now, I have been working on various linguistics aspects of the Journal des Scavans and the Philosophical Transactions in the period 1665–1700. My corpus includes issues from the years 1665, 1675, 1685 and 1695, and totals over 140,000 words. In this chapter1 I shall deal specifically with a problem raised by the thematic analysis of texts in early issues of the Journal des Scavans. For purposes of illustration I shall use examples from the issue of 9 March 1665. There is nothing particularly special about this issue, and it is precisely the fact that it is fairly similar to other issues that makes it useful for our purposes, in that it can be taken as being representative of the other issues of the period. Analysis of the thematic structure and progression of these texts seem to indicate that a standard systemic functional analysis is less than satisfactory, because of the intricacy of the syntactic structure of the clauses. I shall suggest a possible way forward, which gives an analysis that seems more satisfactory.