30.4515, Review: English; Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Biber, Gray (2019)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-4515. Wed Nov 27 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.4515, Review: English; Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Biber, Gray (2019)

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Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2019 19:35:23
From: Jessie Sams [samsj at sfasu.edu]
Subject: Grammatical Complexity in Academic English

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36541837


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-1692.html

AUTHOR: Douglas  Biber
AUTHOR: Bethany  Gray
TITLE: Grammatical Complexity in Academic English
SUBTITLE: Linguistic Change in Writing
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Jessie Sams, Stephen F. Austin State University

SUMMARY

The goals of the book are to demonstrate that “[t]here are different types of
grammatical complexity” (4) and academic writing does not represent one
cohesive register but rather represents diverse registers that have different
expectations and, thus, exhibit different linguistic features. Specifically,
academic scientific writing differs from humanities writing in its goals and
discourse features. Differentiating science writing from humanities writing,
Biber and Gray demonstrate that grammatical complexity in scientific writing
“is associated with structural compression, not structural elaboration,” and
those features have dramatically shifted over the last few centuries (4). They
further argue that “academic science writing has been the locus of some of the
most dramatic grammatical changes that have occurred in English over the past
three centuries” (5). These goals drive the content and data provided
throughout the rest of the book.

Chapter 1 “Academic writing: Challenging the stereotypes” provides a general
introduction to the book and opens with common stereotypes of academic
writing, such as the general belief that “it is deliberately complex, and more
concerned with impressing readers than communicating ideas—all making it
needlessly difficult to understand” (1). Biber and Gray challenge the
assumptions that academic writing represents one style of writing that relies
on “complex and elaborated grammar” that is “maximally explicit in meaning”
and “conservative and resistant to change” (7). Furthermore, they challenge
the theoretical notions that grammatical complexity can only be achieved
through structural elaboration and that “grammatical changes are initiated in
speech” (7). The final sections of the chapter define and exemplify the types
of grammatical changes that occur in language and demonstrate that  “most
grammatical change in English over the past 300 years has been quantitative
rather than categorical,” which is “especially prevalent in academic writing”
(32), and recent grammatical shifts in English are best described by analyzing
frequency of particular features or sets of co-occurring features. Biber and
Gray argue that grammatical changes found in academic writing—specifically
academic science writing—cannot be explained by the common assumption that
change occurs first in speech and later in written form.

Chapter 2 “Using corpora to analyze grammatical change” focuses on
methodology, providing a justification for using corpora to study shifts in
grammatical features and a description of the particular corpora used for the
analyses presented throughout the rest of the book. The chapter opens with a
general discussion of ways corpus research can benefit studies of linguistic
features and an argument for using a blended approach of quantitative and
qualitative analyses when researching with corpora. Biber and Gray state that
quantitative analyses provide the necessary evidence for shifts in linguistic
features but qualitative analyses allow the researcher to “elaborate upon, and
attempt to explain, the functional motivations for such quantitative trends”
(49). Biber and Gray use existing historical corpora to select randomly select
sources to fit into four major categories of academic writing: specialist
science, specialist social science, specialist humanities, and non-specialist
or multi-disciplinary science. Because specialist writing was not prevalent
until the 20th century, most of the specialist texts belong to more current
sources while the non-specialist texts date back to the early 18th century.
Their resulting corpus includes over 7 million words. Along with discussing an
overview of their corpus, Biber and Gray focus on their methods for computing
quantitative results, stating that “[r]ates of occurrence were computed for
each individual text” (59). This strategy differs from other quantitative
approaches that compute results for a given feature per thousand or million
words in the corpus; because Biber and Gray specifically want to compare texts
belonging to different registers, though, their analysis relying on instances
per text allows them to compute a “genuine mean score for each register” and
“a standard deviation [that measured] the extent to which linguistic scores
vary across texts within a register” (59). The end of this chapter is devoted
to the specific linguistic features they searched for within the corpus,
including features connected with colloquial language (e.g., contractions,
progressive aspect, and semi-modals) and grammatical complexity (e.g., finite
dependent clauses and dependent phrases).

In Chapter 3 “Phrasal versus clausal discourse styles: A synchronic
grammatical description of academic writing contrasted with other registers,”
Biber and Gray’s opening discussion highlights current linguistic differences
among registers, specifically connecting those differences to the situational
parameters of audience and purpose. The rest of the chapter focuses on
providing “a relatively comprehensive linguistic description of academic
writing in the late twentieth century” (72). In their discussions on
linguistic features, they demonstrate that academic writing tends to favor a
“dense use of phrasal modifiers” (100), such as post-modifying preposition
phrases, favoring phrasal modifiers over finite dependent clauses, which tend
to be more prevalent in conversation. They further argue “there is no general
academic style” (104) because each text is sensitive to the situational
parameters of intended audience and purpose. Finally, they demonstrate that
phrasal modifiers are most prevalent in specialist science writing, and they
argue that such modifiers “can be associated with a loss of explicitness”
because they are “more compressed,” resulting in “less overt expression of the
meaning relationships among constituents” (121). After establishing the modern
uses of phrasal modifiers in academic writing, Biber and Gray turn to
describing its increase in use over time in the next chapter.

Chapter 4 “The historical evolution of phrasal discourse styles in academic
writing” opens with examples to demonstrate the “extensive register
diversification” in academic writing in the past 300 years, connecting those
changes to two major influences on academic writing: “the increasing
preference for colloquial forms in writing (‘popularization’), and the need to
efficiently convey a great deal of information (‘economy’)” (128). Biber and
Gray further describe these influences, saying that, due to “mass literacy and
near-universal education, … written texts are required for an increasingly
wide audience,” yet at the same time, “academic sub-disciplines have
proliferated and become increasingly specialized in topic, accessible only to
restricted readerships” (129). They argue that one reason for that shift is
the “‘information explosion’ and the need to present more information in an
efficient and concise way” (129). They connect these functional shifts to the
increase of certain colloquial features, such as progressives and semi-modals,
and the increase of phrasal modification, which reduces clarity and
explicitness for non-specialized readers. Results from their corpus further
demonstrate that the shift to increased phrasal modification originated in
academic writing, contrasting the popular belief that changes in language
begin in speech and migrate to written registers.

Having established increased phrasal modification as a feature of academic
writing, specifically in specialist science writing, Biber and Gray turn to
describing the functional uses of phrasal modification in Chapter 5 “The
functional extension of phrasal grammatical features in academic writing.”
This chapter is split into two separate investigations: phrasal
pre-modification of head nouns through the use of attributive nouns and
phrasal post-modification of head nouns, focusing on preposition phrases and
appositional noun phrases. Throughout the first half of the chapter, Biber and
Gray rely on textual examples to demonstrate extensions in the range and
function of pre-modifying nouns. For instance, attributive nouns offer an
alternative to a genitive construction (e.g., “the Communist Party chief”
versus “the Communist’s Party chief” or “the chief of the Communist Party”
(171)); the “semantic classes of the nouns used as pre-modifiers” have been
extended over the last three centuries (174), allowing more relationships
among the attributive noun and head noun, including intangible relationships,
such as “currency troubles” or “heat apoplexy” (175); and current texts
feature strings of pre-modifying nouns, such as “artery blood flow” and
“Pearson correlation coefficients” (177). In the final half of the chapter,
Biber and Gray argue that “[a]cademic research writing often incorporates
sequences of [post-modifying phrases] … creating dense information structures
with few verbs” (192). Using textual examples, they demonstrate that the types
of prepositions allowed to introduce post-modifying phrases have increased in
the past three centuries, which has resulted in an extension of the types of
semantic relationships possible between the head noun and its post-modifying
phrase. They show that the same extension has occurred for appositive noun
phrases, allowing more complex relationships than “a simple co-referential
relationship” (206). They connect these shifts to an “underlying functional
motivation,” arguing that “the drive towards economy of expression [resulted]
in structural compression to convey the maximum amount of information in the
fewest words possible” (207).

Chapter 6 “The loss of explicitness in academic research writing” focuses on
this compression of meaning described in Chapter 5. Biber and Gray argue that
while “written academic texts are more cognitively demanding and complex than
most conversational or popular written texts” (219), their complexity is not
due to embedded dependent clauses that are explicit in meaning. Rather,
“written academic texts systematically prefer compressed structural variants,
resulting in a dense use of grammatical structures that are inexplicit in
meaning on a scale that has not been generally appreciated” (219). This
chapter is devoted to examples of compressed phrasal modifiers in written
texts to demonstrate their potential ambiguities of meaning.

Finally, Chapter 7 “Conclusion” returns to the stereotypes of academic writing
outlined in Chapter 1, connecting information provided throughout the book to
demonstrate that “grammatical complexity is not a single unified construct”
(246), aspects of language change can—and did—originate in written texts, and
academic writing is not as resistant to change or explicit as many believe.
This brief chapter ends with the authors’ larger goal for the book: “It is our
hope that the volume will serve as a starting point … for future research by
scholars coming from a range of perspectives” (256).

EVALUATION

The intended audience includes scholars who are familiar with grammatical
description of language but who may not be convinced of the need for corpora
work for investigating grammatical structures or the importance of studying
written texts for language features. Specifically, Biber and Gray seem to be
targeting scholars who approach academic writing with these stereotypical
assumptions: “1. all kinds of academic prose are essentially the same; 2.
academic prose employs complex and elaborated grammar; 3. academic prose is
maximally explicit in meaning; 4. academic prose is conservative and resistant
to linguistic change” (7).

Furthermore, their intended readership may hold the following two theoretical
assumptions about language change: “1. grammatical complexity is equivalent to
structural elaboration, realized especially through the increased use of
dependent clauses; 2. grammatical changes are initiated in speech; grammatical
innovations do not occur in writing” (7). Because their intended readers may
approach language with these assumptions, Biber and Gray challenge each
assumption in turn and use careful repetition of data to demonstrate how each
of these stereotypes is based in inaccurate assumptions. Their hope is that
readers will be willing to take a new approach to studying language, and they
provide enough quantitative evidence with detailed qualitative descriptions
that even the most doubting readers may experience a shift in their ideas or
assumptions about academic language and language change.

The best feature of this book is the inclusion of data viewed from multiple
perspectives, showing the thoughtfulness with which Biber and Gray examined
their corpora. For example, rather than only presenting quantitative results
showing an increased use of appositive noun phrases, they demonstrate the
expanded types of relationships offered by appositive noun phrases and
connected those expanding relationships to situational parameters and
communicative functions. For every increase of a feature they identify, they
strive to connect that increase to a decrease of another feature, such as
connecting the downward trend of genitive structures to the upward trend of
nominal pre-modifiers. Furthermore, every major finding is supported in
multiple methods, including textual examples, tables providing statistical
analyses, and charts demonstrating the raw difference among quantifiable
instances of particular features.

The drawback of the information redundancy is that the book does not read well
from beginning to end, especially for scholars who do not approach written
language with the assumptions outlined in Chapter 1. While the redundancy
helps to underscore Biber and Gray’s goals throughout the text, portions
overlap so much that the book becomes difficult to read. For instance, the
latter half of Chapter 5 and the content of Chapter 6 provide the same type of
information, so the material could have been condensed into a single chapter.
A benefit of the redundancy, though, is that readers can select the sections
necessary to their research or pertinent to their own interests without
needing to read the surrounding material for full context.

This book is most useful for linguists or academic scholars interested in
language change, textual features (especially as those features intersect with
communicative or social functions), and/or corpus-based research.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jessie Sams is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Stephen F. Austin
State University. Her primary research interests include the interface of
syntax and semantics, especially the intersection of the two within written
English quotatives; English grammar; history of the English language and
English etymology; and constructed languages.





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