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Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change
Edited by Richard J. Whitt
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 85] 2018
► pp. 117–146

Academic writing as a locus of grammatical change

The development of phrasal complexity features

 | Iowa State University
 | Northern Arizona University
Based on large-scale corpus analysis, this study challenges the notion that academic writing is conservative and resistant to change by documenting linguistic innovations that have emerged in academic writing over the past 200 years. The study explores the dramatic patterns of change that have culminated in the present-day phrasal discourse style of academic writing. The study demonstrates that academic writing today employs a dense use of phrasal complexity features which were minimally used in earlier historical periods. Cross-register comparisons show that these features have largely not been adopted in other spoken and written registers, and none to the extent as in academic writing. The results, which illustrate that these changes have been both quantitative and functional in nature, thus challenge not only the view that academic writing is resistant to change, but also the claim that grammatical innovation originates primarily in speech.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Colloquialization in writing
    • 1.2Register features of present-day academic writing
    • 1.3Two types of historical development: The need for quantitative corpus-based research
    • 1.4Goals of the study
  • 2.Corpora and analytical methods
  • 3.The historical evolution of academic writing: Quantitative increases and functional extensions of phrasal complexity features
    • 3.1General patterns of historical change: Phrasal and clausal complexity features
    • 3.2Nouns as noun pre-modifiers across written registers
    • 3.3Prepositional phrases as noun post-modifiers across written registers
  • 4.Summing up: Academic writing as a locus of historical change
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.85.06gra
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