Books by David Banks

This study is a linguistic analysis of the first two academic periodicals from their creation in 1665 until the end of the seventeenth century. These were Le Journal des Scavans in France and the Philosophical Transactions in England. The analysis is carried out within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics.

This book is one of the first applications of a functional approach to language across time. It first summarizes and evaluates previous studies of the development of scientific language, including Halliday's exploration of this fascinating topic. It then traces the development of scientific writing as a genre, in terms of its linguistic features, from Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe (the first technical text written in English) almost to the present. It goes on to consider texts by major scientists of the late seventeenth century, and then analyses and discusses a corpus of texts taken from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, covering the period 1700 to 1980.