Studies of L2 writing development usually measure T‐units and clausal subordination to assess grammatical complexity, assuming that increased subordination is typical of advanced writing. In this article we challenge this practice by showing that these measures are much more characteristic of conversation than academic writing. The article begins with a critical evaluation of T‐units and clausal subordination as measures of writing development, arguing that they have not proven to be effective discriminators of language proficiency differences. These shortcomings lead to the question of whether these measures actually capture the complexities of professional academic writing, and if not, what alternative measures are better suited? Corpus‐based analyses are undertaken to answer these questions, investigating 28 grammatical features in research articles contrasted with conversation. The results are surprising, showing that most clausal subordination measures are actually more common in conversation than academic writing. In contrast, fundamentally different kinds of grammatical complexity are common in academic writing: complex noun phrase constituents (rather than clause constituents) and complex phrases (rather than clauses). Based on these findings, we hypothesize a sequence of developmental stages for student writing, proposing a radically new approach for the study of complexity in student writing development.

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Many discussions of grammatical change have focused on grammatical innovation in the discourse contexts of conversational interaction. We argue here that it is also possible for grammatical innovation to emerge out of the communicative demands of written discourse. In particular, the distinctive communicative characteristics of academic writing (informational prose) have led to the development of a discourse style that relies heavily on nominal structures, with extensive phrasal modification and a relative absence of verbs. By tracking the historical development of this discourse style, we can also observe the development of particular grammatical functions that are emerging in writing. We focus here on two grammatical features -nouns as nominal premodifiers and prepositional phrases as nominal postmodifiers -analyzing their historical development over the last four centuries in a corpus of academic research writing (compared to other registers such as fiction, newspaper reportage and conversation). Our analysis shows that these grammatical features were quite restricted in function and variability in earlier historical periods of English. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they became much more frequent and productive, accompanied by major extensions in their functions, variants, and range of lexical associations. These extensions were restricted primarily to informational written discourse, illustrating ways in which new grammatical functions emerge in writing rather than speech.