ABSTRACT
Language has created a form of knowledge and understanding that is hegemonic, self-evident and beyond the reach of human subjectivity. To understand the relationship between context and language, linguists and sociologists have begun to probe the epistemological basis of the sciences, bringing their historical foundations into the spotlight. This chapter looks at how academic writing has been seen to change over time and how such change has been studied. It discusses approach to researching diachronic change in academic writing. In the domain of published academic writing, the variability of rhetorical practices over time underlines the importance of social factors in transforming research activities into academic knowledge. The chapter presents the main features of the corpus and a particular type of language over a given time span, sampling texts that were as typical as possible to achieve a reasonable representation of writing over that period in specific disciplines.
