Abstract
Language and thought are intimately related: philosophers have long debated how a given language may condition the oral and written expression of thought. The language chosen to communicate scientific discoveries may facilitate or impede international access to such knowledge. Vector and message may become intertwined in ways not yet fully understood: comparing and contrasting dictionary definitions of key terms, such as the Humboldtian Weltansicht, may provide useful insights into this process. Semantic prosody, a linguistic phenomenon brought to light by corpus linguistics through the analysis of ever vaster corpora, may have unsuspected and even unconscious impacts on the perception of a message. A case study of data from WebsTerre, a diachronic corpus of geological English, explores a twentieth-century Kuhnian paradigm shift in Earth Science, from continental drift to plate tectonics, to demonstrate how interactions between semantic prosody and translation have the potential to alter the history of science.
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Notes
The two-million-word WebsTerre corpus contains geological texts published between 1830 and 1990.
See the discussion about changes in pronunciation of the letter ‘h’, in Sect. 4
Details of the results in this section can be found in the author’s unpublished PhD thesis, https://www.theses.fr/2012LORIL282.
The transcript of the debate, available online, reads as follows:
Wallace: “Do you believe that human pollution, gashouse, greenhouse gas emissions contributes to the global warming of this planet?”.
Trump: “I think a lot of things do, but I think to an extent yes. I think, to an extent, yes.”.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/09/30/presidential-debate-read-full-transcript-first-debate/3587462001/ Accessed on 31 May 2021.
The transfer of negative semantic prosody when ‘cause’ is associated with ‘change’ is discussed in Louw and Chateau-Smith (2010).
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Acknowledgements
The organisers of the Lisbon Workshop in 2019 are thanked for the opportunity to present a preliminary version of this study. The author is grateful to the Franco-Canadian art historian and archaeologist, Dr Laetitia Métreau, for the many fruitful debates that have greatly contributed to the quality of this paper. Dr Josef Wilczek provided further insights to improve the final version of the paper. Mme Geneviève Rérolle-Pouffier is thanked for providing assistance with German expressions. The helpful remarks of the editors and an anonymous reviewer have contributed greatly to the readability of the study. Any remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the author.
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Chateau-Smith, C. Language, Thought, and the History of Science. Topoi 41, 573–586 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-021-09760-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-021-09760-3