Referential Behavior in Scientific Writing: aDiachronic Study (1810–1995)

Objective, corpus and methods. The purpose of this paper is toexamine both qualitatively and quantitatively the diachronic evolution of referential behavior inmedical English written discourse within a social constructivist perspective. To this end, Ianalyzed a corpus of 162 medical articles published in 34 different British and American medicaljournals between 1810 and 1995. The total number of reference patterns was recorded in eacharticle and...