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24 - Language and Science, Language in Science, and Linguistics as Science

from Part III - SFL in Application

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2019

By
M. A. K. Halliday  and
David G. Butt
Edited by
Geoff Thompson ,
Wendy L. Bowcher ,
Lise Fontaine  and
David Schönthal
Geoff Thompson
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
Wendy L. Bowcher
Affiliation:
Sun Yat-Sen University, China
Lise Fontaine
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
David Schönthal
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
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Summary

This chapter highlights various correspondences between historical and contextual changes affecting enquiries into nature, and the ways such enquiries took up meaning potential offered by choices in the structure of language. The main focus is vernacular English after 1600, although the legacy of classical forms (rhetorical and morphological structures) that were the basis of Aristotelian and later Latin authority are also discussed. The period 1600–1700 is taken as the ‘watershed’ of change and development when speech and written forms responded to new semantic pressures. Beside the shift between Latin and exposition and argument in vernacular languages, there were registerial pressures. These created a vector character in the drift of English grammar that can be seen in shifts in the contexts of enquiry, and in the evolving and intensifying patterns of change that have influenced the idiom across sciences and other registers. Three issues are covered in the chapter: the role of language in the development and evolution of science; the current character of verbal science, with its dramatic ‘swerve’ into a favoured pattern for recoding experience and for reconstruing common-sense reasoning; and the paradoxical place of linguistics and its techniques in the history and present state of scientific discourse.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics , pp. 620 - 650
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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