Botany texts and the popular terminology of plants during the Late Modern English period in Ireland

In the first part of my work on popular botanic terminology in Ireland (Cesiri 2012), I considered a 1735 text in which the author, John K’Eogh, attempted to produce a work on Irish medicinal plants in order to explain their properties to the general public who could, subsequently, use them in everyday life. The analysis of the popular names of the plants contained in the volume revealed the tendency to repeat patterns of word-formation in the terms reported as well as the use of what Gotti (2003: 73-74) defines as “nominal adjectivation, i.e. the use of a noun to specify another with an adjectival function”, a very common phenomenon in present-day specialized discourse borrowed from general language. The text examined, then, revealed a tendency typical of present-day scientific texts. The aim of the present study is to analyze the popular terms used in botany texts published in Ireland during the Late Modern English (LModE) period, in particular during the 19th century, in order to investigate whether the tendency discovered in K’Eogh (1735) was adopted also in later centuries, thus becoming typical of the specific textual genre, or whether these texts followed different patterns of word-formation. The investigation conducted in the present contribution will be important to discover possible patterns inside the textual genre of botany texts published in Ireland during the LModE period compared to those already found in the 18th-century text. This comparison and the diachronic approach undertaken in the present project might produce a finer-grained definition of the textual genre itself.