Notes on Change in Syntactic Structures in Scientific English during the Course of a Century (1904 – 2005)

This paper analyses psychology and economics texts with the aim to detect changes in syntactic structures in scientific English that occurred over a hundred-year time span. The findings indicate that current academic texts are less complex and more impersonal than a hundred years ago and show a tendency towards a non-finite mode of expression. The paper introduces concrete examples of syntactic structures that illustrate these changes.