| English for science and technology (EST) is one of the important branches of English for special purposes (ESP). EST is a functional variety of modern English with its own characteristic features. Any language would not stay still. With the passing of time, the EST has been changing gradually. These changes mainly focus on stylistics. With the special emphasis on meeting of the needs of development of science and technology, the changes in the use of the four features of EST are studied. These four features include passive voice, nominalization, personal pronouns and hedges. This is a corpus-based study. The corpora used in this study contain texts taken from an American academic journal Journal of Nutrition. This journal is widely accepted as an authoritative academic journal, and gets its reputation in the field of food science with a history of eighty-three years since1928, and the papers in this journal are mostly written by native American and British scientific scholars. Therefore, it is an ideal source to tap for the useful data for the study. The two corpora are composed of research papers drawn from two different periods of time:1961-1970and2001-2010, with the purpose of comparing the papers of these two time periods and finding out the stylistic changes in EST discourses. On the basis of quantitative data, a qualitative analysis of the changes of EST is conducted so as to give possible reasons for the change. The statistical test, the log-likelihood ratio, is used to verify the significant difference between the data drawn from the two corpora. Finally, the result shows that EST does undergo great changes. The frequencies of passive voice, personal pronouns and hedges reduce to a great extent, while the nominalization appears more than before. From the perspectives of these four features, therefore, EST papers tend to be more concise and formal. |
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