Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 545):
We have suggested that the immediate context for this change was a discursive one: the evolution of a register of experimental science, in which certain forms of argumentation were highly valued. This is usually interpreted simply as the emergence of a particular genre, the scientific article; but that is only one side of the story — no such genre could have come into being without these changes in the grammar of the clause.