ABSTRACT
From the results reported so far, it is clear that scientific research writing in the PTRS has evolved dramatically, if for the most part incrementally, over the past 300 years. In this chapter, I first attempt to synthesize these findings, considering both long-term, continuous development in the journal’s rhetoric and language as well as cross-time discontinuities revealed therein. I then discuss these synthesized results in relation to their larger sociohistorical contexts: the Discourse histories of British science, generally, and to some degree the Royal Society and its PTRS. It is only in accomplishing the latter that the model of discourse analysis laid out in chapter 1 will be brought to bear, and the data presented in chapter 4 and 5 be seen to make sense.
