Elaboration, compression and explicitness across sub-registers of popular and academic writing in Hong Kong
English
In this study we examine elaboration, compression and explicitness in academic and popular writing in an Outer
Circle variety of English, that of Hong-Kong, as represented in the International Corpus of English corpus. As
Biber and Gray (2016) show, contemporary academic discourse is structurally compressed at
NP level (rather than elaborated) and inexplicit in the expression of meaning. The linguistic features selected for analysis are
short passives, which are compressed and inexplicit, and adnominal relative clauses, which represent the opposite tendency, that
towards elaboration and explicitness. We focus on register variation through analyzing, first, differences between academic and
popular writing, and second, interdisciplinary variation in four sub-registers: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and
technology.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background: A register approach to Hong Kong English
- 2.1Popular and academic writing in the International Corpus of English: Context, function and sub-disciplinary areas
- 2.2Adnominal relative postmodifiers and passives clauses
- 3.Methodology
- 4.Results
- 4.1Passives in HKE academic and popular writing
- 4.2Relative clauses in HKE academic and popular writing
- 5.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Batchelor, Jordan
2023.
Scientists say: Patterns of attribution in popular and professional science writing.
Journal of English for Academic Purposes 65
► pp. 101273 ff.
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