Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 569-70):
In the early scientific period in the West, new registers evolved as part of the ongoing reconstruction of experience in the form of systematic knowledge and experimental science. Perhaps the earliest to evolve in these new contexts were those registers associated with the exploration, storage and dissemination of new knowledge about plants and herbs in the 16th and 17th centuries. These new contexts put pressure on the linguistic resources, and the meaning-creating power of these resources correspondingly increased. We can hypothesise a gradual evolution from the registers of ordinary language, with their folk models of the world, including folk taxonomies of plants and herbs, to more specialised scientific ones. It was at this point, as people became aware of the rapid development of new knowledge and the need for processing and storing it, that conscious design of language began, with nomenclatures and taxonomies being explicitly discussed and fixed. At the same time — but in this case without conscious design — new ways of meaning evolved in the construction of figures and sequences.