Challenging stereotypes about academic writing: Complexity, elaboration, explicitness
Challenging stereotypes about academic writing: Complexity, elaboration, explicitness
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DOI：
10.1016/j.jeap.2010.01.001
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发表时间：
2010-03-01
影响因子：
3
通讯作者：
Gray, Bethany
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Biber, Douglas;Gray, Bethany
人们对专业学术写作的刻板印象是，它语法复杂，结构复杂，意义关系表达清晰。相比之下，口语语域，尤其是会话，被认为具有相反的特征。我们在本文中的目标是基于大规模语料库调查的结果来挑战这些刻板印象。我们的发现有力地支持了学术写作和会话具有截然不同的语言特征的观点。然而，具体的差异相当令人惊讶。首先，我们证明了学术写作在结构上并不是‘精细的’(在这个术语的传统意义上)。事实上，从属从句--尤其是限定从属从句--在会话中比学术写作中更常见。相反，学术写作在结构上是“压缩的”，在名词短语中嵌入短语(非从句)修饰语。此外，我们对学术写作意义明确的刻板印象提出了挑战。相反，我们认为，与采用精心设计的结构的另类文体相比，学术文章的“压缩”语篇文体在意义上要不那么明确。这些样式对于专业读者来说是高效的，他们可以从相对较短的浓缩文本中快速提取大量信息。然而，它们给新手读者带来了困难，他们必须学会推断语法成分之间的未指明的意义关系。(C)2010爱思唯尔有限公司。保留所有权利。
The stereotypical view of professional academic writing is that it is grammatically complex, with elaborated structures, and with meaning relations expressed explicitly. In contrast, spoken registers, especially conversation, are believed to have the opposite characteristics. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based on results from large-scale corpus investigations. Our findings strongly support the view that academic writing and conversation have dramatically different linguistic characteristics. However, the specific differences are quite surprising. First, we show that academic writing is not structurally 'elaborated' (in the traditional sense of this term). In fact, subordinate clauses - especially finite dependent clauses - are much more common in conversation than academic writing. Instead, academic writing is structurally 'compressed', with phrasal (non-clausal) modifiers embedded in noun phrases. Additionally, we challenge the stereotype that academic writing is explicit in meaning. Rather, we argue that the 'compressed' discourse style of academic writing is much less explicit in meaning than alternative styles employing elaborated structures. These styles are efficient for expert readers, who can quickly extract large amounts of information from relatively short, condensed texts. However, they pose difficulties for novice readers, who must learn to infer unspecified meaning relations among grammatical constituents. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.