We present a model of the linguistic development of scientific English from the mid-seventeenth to the late-nineteenth century, a period that witnessed significant political and social changes, including the evolution of modern science. There is a wealth of descriptive accounts of scientific English, both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, but only few attempts at a unified explanation of its evolution. The explanation we offer here is a communicative one: while external pressures (specialization, diversification) push for an increase in expressivity, communicative concerns pull toward convergence on particular options (conventionalization). What emerges over time is a code which is optimized for written, specialist communication, relying on specific linguistic means to modulate information content. As we show, this is achieved by the systematic interplay between lexis and grammar. The corpora we employ are the Royal Society Corpus (RSC) and for comparative purposes, the Corpus of Late Modern English (CLMET). We build various diachronic, computational n-gram language models of these corpora and then apply formal measures of information content (here: relative entropy and surprisal) to detect the linguistic features significantly contributing to diachronic change, estimate the (changing) level of information of features and capture the time course of change.

中文翻译：

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寻求最佳的交流代码：科学英语案例

我们提供了一个模型，描述了从17世纪中叶到19世纪末期科学英语的语言发展，这一时期见证了重大的政治和社会变革，包括现代科学的发展。从共时性和历时性的角度来看，科学英语都有大量的描述性叙述，但是只有很少的尝试来统一解释其发展。我们在这里提供的解释是一种交流的解释：虽然外部压力（专业化，多样化）推动表达力的提高，但交流的关注却促使特定选项趋同（传统化）。随着时间的流逝，出现了一种针对书面专业交流而优化的代码，它依赖于特定的语言手段来调制信息内容。正如我们所展示的 这是通过词汇和语法之间系统的相互作用来实现的。我们使用的语料库是皇家学会语料库（RSC），出于比较目的，我们使用的是现代英语后期语料库（CLMET）。我们建立了这些语料库的各种历时性，计算性n元语法模型，然后应用信息内容的形式化度量（此处为：相对熵和惊奇）来检测对历时性变化有重大贡献的语言特征，并估计信息的（变化）水平。功能并捕获变化的时间过程。