The Manifestation of the Author in the Dissertation (At the Origins of the Language of Science)

The research objective is to identify the language features that characterize the genre canon of the dissertation at the initial phase of its formation and the limits of the author’s freedom in selecting the language means of implementing this canon. The language of science of the 18th century, as well as of the earlier periods, is Latin, and it is there that the principles are born, which will then form the basis of the scientific style of contemporary national languages. The research material is the Latin text of the PhD thesis of the famous German anatomist Adam C. Thebesius (1668-1720) De circulo sanguinis in corde [About the Circle of Blood in the Heart]. The main research methods are stylistic and discourse analysis. Consistently analyzing Thebesius’s text, we have found that many language means of formal and semantic architectonics of the text are similar to modern ones. Compositional features include the presence of an introduction describing the relevance of the research problem and the depth of its knowledge, the text division into paragraphs, the presence of an appendix, the system of bibliographical references and in-text references. Thebesius’s text contains the syntactic operators that denote the sequence and logical relations of thought operations (igitur, tamen, hoc vero, e contrario, etc.), the evaluation of the truth of the statements (nimirum, haud dubie, forsitan, videntur, etc.), the means of reducing categoricity (conjunctivus, futurum, gerundium). Thebesius also uses the first-person plural forms of verbs in an inclusive and generalizing sense. At the same time, we find certain language features that are not present in modern dissertations. For example, the subjective-evaluative component is strongly expressed in Thebesius’s text, and it is manifested both by expressive vocabulary (insignius, artificiosus, ingeniose, forte fortuna, etc.) and grammatical forms (comparativus, superlativus). Clarity is often achieved by rich imagery (similes, epithets, expanded metaphors). The noted similarities and differences in the language manifestation of the author allowed us to infer that the identified features of the language were acceptable for the research thesis genre in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus, our observations suggest that the language of science at that time was significantly more “rhetorical” and more “authorial” than the contemporary one.

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