"Shaping Scientific Discourse: the Scientific Epistolary Article and the Philosophical Transactions"

Cultural change and scientific progress have an undisputed influence on language change and on the emergence of new uses of language, which necessitate suitable channels to be articulated. It has often happened that some pre-existing genres, used to vehicle other communicative purposes in certain specific contexts, have provided the ground on which new discourses could be constructed. In such cases, a process of mutual adaptation has taken place, in which the new discourse shapes and is shaped by the existing genre through which it is expressed, and the outcome is usually a hybrid textual type. A good example of genre-mixing deriving from this kind of process is the scientific epistolary article, which arose during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a privileged form of delineation and promulgation of empirical knowledge among the members of the Royal Society of London. They consisted in reports written in the form of epistolary accounts by affiliates to the Society, which were sent to the leaders of the association in order to be read out at the weekly meetings with their co-members, to be subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions. The purpose of this essay is to analyse the rhetorical strategies and the text-forming devices at work in the construction of scientific discourse in this particular textual typology in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, particularly during the second half of the eighteenth century, in order to investigate the possible connections between the utilization of this hybrid genre and the socio-historical context under examination.