Perception, Communication, Desire, and Aspectual Verbs in 18th And 19th Century History Writing: A Diachronic Analysis of Male and Female Writers in the Coruña Corpus of History English Texts

Abstract

The understanding of history began to shift decisively in the eighteenth century and reached full institutional consolidation as an academic discipline in the nineteenth. Against this backdrop, this article explores how four semantic classes of verbs –communication, perception, desire, and aspectual verbs– are distributed and used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historiographical texts drawn from the History English Texts subcorpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The study pursues two main aims. First, it examines the frequency of these verb classes within historical discourse of the period. Second, it analyses their use from a gender perspective, asking whether male and female authors display comparable or divergent patterns. The findings point to clear asymmetries: male authors employ these verbs more frequently and with greater semantic range, while the patterns observed in women’s writing shed light on their discursive positioning within historiography across
the two centuries.