Chapter published in:
Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language ChangeEdited 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
Bethany Gray | Iowa State University
Douglas Biber | 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.
Published online: 08 November 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.85.06gra
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.85.06gra
References
References
Aktas, Rahime Nur & Cortes, Viviana
Aronoff, Mark
Baratta, Alexander
Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward
1997 Diachronic relations among speech-based and written registers in English. In To Explain the Present: Studies in Changing English in Honor of Matti Rissanen, Terttu Nevalainen & Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (eds), 253–276. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. [reprinted in Susan Conrad & Douglas Biber (eds) 2001, 66–83]
Biber, Douglas, Finegan, Edward & Atkinson, Dwight
Biber, Douglas & Gray, Bethany
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward
Bybee, Joan & Hopper, Paul
Charles, Maggie
Crespo García, Begoña & Moskowich-Spiegel Fandiño, Isabel
Denison, David
Fillmore, Charles
Flowerdew, John & Forest, Richard W.
Gray, Bethany
Groom, Nicholas
Halliday, Michael A. K.
Halliday, Michael A. K. & Martin, James R.
Hundt, Marianne & Mair, Christian
Hyland, Ken & Tse, Polly
Krug, Manfred
Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas
Mair, Christian
McWhorter, John
Tagliamonte, Sali
Wells, Rulon
Xiao, Richard