From a one-dimensional hierarchy to a multidimensional space of scientific english: the relationship between a discipline’s place in the hierarchy of the sciences and its use of grammatical structures

Abstract The idea of a Hierarchy of the Sciences (HoS), first proposed by Auguste Comte in the 19th Century, argues that scientific disciplines can be ordered in a hierarchy of complexity, with the inorganic sciences (Astronomy, Physics) being the least complex and the organic sciences (Biology, Sociology) being the most complex. Nearly 200 years later, this order still reflects widely held attitudes towards the relationships between and within academic (sub-) disciplines. HoS-related hypotheses have been supported by a variety of studies using bibliographic, linguistic and scientometric data. The present study investigates whether there is further linguistic, more precisely, grammatical evidence to support or qualify the HoS. We collected a corpus of 39,809 research article abstracts (7,630,993 words) from the Web of Science (WoS) database, performed a multidimensional analysis to identify typical patterns of co-occurring grammatical features and then compared the results of the sub-corpora of the disciplines commonly included in research on the HoS (Arts & Humanities, Sociology, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy & Astrophysics and Mathematics). Although some of our findings replicated those of previous studies, notably that the grammatically most similar disciplines are those adjacent in traditional arrangements on the HoS, we did not find evidence of a simple one-dimensional hierarchy. Instead, our findings indicate that typical grammatical patterns in the disciplines at the extremes of the traditional hierarchy also resemble one another. This suggests that, as far as grammatical patterns are concerned, representing disciplines in a two-dimensional space of the sciences is superior to a one-dimensional hierarchy.