The diachronic development of combining forms in scientific writing

• Main Authors: Menzel Katrin, Degaetano-Ortlieb Stefania
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2017-12-01
• Series: Lege Artis. Language yesterday, today, tomorrow
• Subjects: combining forms; morphology; history of scientific English; languages for specific purposes; information density; corpus linguistics
• Online Access: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lart.2017.2.issue-2/lart-2017-0016/lart-2017-0016.xml?format=INT
• ISSN: 2453-8035

This paper addresses the diachronic development of combining forms in English scientific texts over approximately 350 years, from the early stages of the first scholarly journals that were published in English to contemporary English scientific publications. In this paper a critical discussion of the category of combining forms is presented and a case study is produced to examine the role of selected combining forms in two diachronic English corpora.