Is conversation more grammatically complex than academic writing?
- Conversation is usually considered to be grammatically simple, while academic writing is often claimed to be structurally complex, associated primarily with a greater use of dependent clauses. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based on the results of large-scale corpus investigations. We argue that both conversation and professional academic writing are grammatically complex but that their complexities are dramatically different. Surprisingly, the traditional view that complexity is realized through extensive clausal embedding leads to the conclusion that conversation is more complex than academic writing. In contrast, written academic discourse is actually much more ‘compressed’ than elaborated, and the complexities of academic writing are realized mostly as phrasal embedding rather than embedded clauses.
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| Author: | Douglas BiberGND, Bethany Grey |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-122523 |
| ISBN: | 978-3-8233-6648-5 |
| Parent Title (English): | Grammar & Corpora 2009. Third International Conference. Mannheim, 22.-24.09.2009 |
| Parent Title (German): | Grammatik und Korpora 2009. Dritte Internationale Konferenz. Mannheim, 22.-24.9.2009 |
| Series (Serial Number): | Korpuslinguistik und interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Sprache | Corpus Linguistics and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language | CLIP (1) |
| Publisher: | Narr |
| Place of publication: | Tübingen |
| Editor: | Marek Konopka, Jacqueline Kubczak, Christian Mair, František Šticha, Ulrich Hermann Waßner |
| Document Type: | Part of a Book |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first Publication: | 2011 |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2023/10/31 |
| Publishing Institution: | Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) [Zweitveröffentlichung] |
| Publicationstate: | Zweitveröffentlichung |
| Reviewstate: | (Verlags)-Lektorat |
| GND Keyword: | Gesprochene Sprache; Grammatik; Korpus <Linguistik> |
| First Page: | 47 |
| Last Page: | 61 |
| DDC classes: | 400 Sprache / 400 Sprache, Linguistik |
| Open Access?: | ja |
| Linguistics-Classification: | Angewandte Linguistik |
| Linguistics-Classification: | Grammatikforschung |
| Licence (German): |  Urheberrechtlich geschützt |