2011
DOI: 10.1017/s1360674311000025
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Grammatical change in the noun phrase: the influence of written language use

Abstract: 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 abs… Show more

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Cited by 213 publications
(97 citation statements)
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References 23 publications
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“…twentieth-century English (Greenbaum 1969;Biber et al 1999) began in the 1800s. This finding also underlines the importance of considering formal, learned genres when charting language change, as they can be in the forefront of the formation of new linguistic patterns, especially in terms of written language (Biber & Gray 2011). At the same time, our study did not find evidence of frequent use of conjuncts in conversation, which has also been recorded in the twentieth century.…”
Section: Semantic Types and Genresupporting
confidence: 75%
“…twentieth-century English (Greenbaum 1969;Biber et al 1999) began in the 1800s. This finding also underlines the importance of considering formal, learned genres when charting language change, as they can be in the forefront of the formation of new linguistic patterns, especially in terms of written language (Biber & Gray 2011). At the same time, our study did not find evidence of frequent use of conjuncts in conversation, which has also been recorded in the twentieth century.…”
Section: Semantic Types and Genresupporting
confidence: 75%
“…The success of prescriptive influence on relativizer choice in the US (see Hundt & Leech 2012;Leech et al 2009) therefore turns out to be a fairly recent development. The British prescriptive stance on the avoidance Biber & Gray 2011). At the same time, we see an increase in some kinds of premodification (i.e.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 73%
“…While beginning and intermediate L2 learners may prefer complexity by coordination and subordination, phrasal complexity may be favoured at more advanced levels of L2 proficiency (Ortega, ). In line with these recommendations, in a number of recent studies, is has been proposed to use more fine‐grained measures that address different types of subordination, and to distinguish nominal subordination from subordination via subject/object relative clauses (Biber & Gray, ; Biber, Gray & Poonpon, 2011; Biber, Gray & Staples, 2016; Housen et al, ; Kyle & Crossley, ; Lu, , ; Lambert & Kormos, ).…”
Section: Variation In Syntactic Complexitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Although an unequivocal effect of task modality with respect to syntactic complexity has not been established, in studies that did find such an influence, higher syntactic complexity, in writing, was observed (Kuiken & Vedder, , ). Biber and Gray, () and Biber et al (2011) found that oral and written speech may differ in syntactic complexity in various ways. By contrasting findings of a large‐scale corpus‐based analysis of academic research articles with patterns of use in an oral corpus, it was observed that clausal subordination appears to be rather common in daily conversation, in contrast to the frequent use of complex noun phrase constituents and complex phrases in academic writing.…”
Section: Variation In Syntactic Complexitymentioning
confidence: 99%