This study is a linguistic analysis of the first two academic
periodicals from their creation in 1665 until the end of the seventeenth
century. These were the Journal des Sçavans in France and the
Philosophical Transactions in England. The analysis is carried out
within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The linguistic
features and aspects of the theory necessary for understanding the rest
of the book are explained, and the historical situation is described in
order to place the texts in the context from which they derived. The
corpus is made up of a selection of issues for the years 1665, 1675,
1685 and 1694/5, totalling over 66,000 words for the Journal des
Sçavans, and over 77,000 words for the Philosophical Transactions.
Thematic structure and progression, types of process, expressions of
modality, and nominalised processes are studied in each of the
periodicals and the results compared. It is shown that differences in
the results for the two journals derive from differing editorial
decisions, which themselves are engendered by the historical context.