Bethany Gray

Current Conceptions of Stance

The linguistic mechanisms that convey a speaker or writer’s personal attitudes and assessments have long been of interest to linguists, and several major approaches to this function of language have been taken. In this chapter we survey several related threads of research, including evidentiality (e.g. Chafe, 1986), affect (e.g. Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989), hedging (e.g. Hyland, 1998b), evaluation (e.g. Thompson and Hunston, 2000), appraisal (e.g. Martin, 2000) and stance (e.g. Biber and Finegan, 1989). While each paradigm has its own focus and approach, this body of research as a whole contributes to our understanding of the ways in which speakers and writers encode opinions and assessments in the language they produce. In this chapter, we will refer to this overall concept as stance. Studies within these paradigms have been conducted with a variety of methodologies, ranging from detailed analyses of a single text to largescale investigations of patterns across texts in a corpus, as well as from detailed analyses of a single linguistic item or feature to descriptions of a large set of lexical and grammatical features. Taken together, these studies show that the expression of stance varies along two major parameters: (1) meaning of the assessment: personal feeling/attitude H status of knowledge (2) linguistic level used for the assessment: lexical H grammatical

Being Specific about Historical Change The Influence of Sub-Register

This article argues that historical linguistic change is mediated by register differences at a highly specific level. As a result, seemingly minor differences in register can correspond to meaningful and systematic differences in the patterns of linguistic change. Two specific case studies of twentieth-century historical change are presented. The first explores variation among sub-registers of news reportage, comparing the patterns of change in magazine articles from Time magazine to those found in newspaper articles from the New York Times. This case study shows that the differing readerships and purposes of magazines versus newspapers result in different historical-linguistic patterns of use. The second case study then explores variation among sub-registers of academic research writing. This study shows how differences associated with academic discipline (science vs. social science vs. humanities) correspond to systematically different trends in historical change. Even more surprising, this study shows that science articles published in journals aimed at multidisciplinary audiences differ from articles published in journals targeted toward specialized audiences. In the conclusion, we briefly consider the theoretical issue of whether these case studies illustrate historical change within a register or change to new registers. However, the primary goal of the article is methodological, to argue for more attention to register differences in corpus-based historical research.

Linguistic variation in research articles : when discipline tells only part of the story

Linguistic Variation in Research Articles investigates the linguistic characteristics of academic research articles, going beyond a traditional analysis of the generically-defined research article to take into account varied realizations of research articles within and across disciplines. It combines corpus-based analyses of 70+ linguistic features with analyses of the situational, or non-linguistic, characteristics of the Academic Journal Registers Corpus : 270 research articles from 6 diverse disciplines (philosophy, history, political science, applied linguistics, biology, physics) and representing three sub-registers (theoretical, quantitative, and qualitative research). Comprehensive analyses include a lexical/grammatical survey, an exploration of structural complexity, and a Multi-Dimensional analysis, all interpreted relative to the situational analysis of the corpus. The finding that linguistic variation in research articles does not occur along a single parameter like discipline is discussed relative to our understanding of disciplinary practices, the multidimensional nature of variation in research articles, and resulting methodological considerations for corpus studies of disciplinary writing.

Academic Writing Development at the University Level: Phrasal and Clausal Complexity across Level of Study, Discipline, and Genre.

Using the British Academic Written English corpus, this study focuses on the use of grammatical complexity features in university level texts written by first language (L1) English writers to demonstrate knowledge and perform other specialized tasks required of advanced academic writers. While the primary focus of the analysis is on writing development from first-year undergraduate to graduate students, we also consider interactions with discipline and genre. The study goes beyond most previous work on grammatical complexity in writing by investigating the use of phrasal as well as clausal features. The results show that as academic level increases, the use of phrasal complexity features in writing also increases. On the other hand, the use of clausal complexity features in student writing, particularly finite dependent clauses, decreases as academic level increases. Results further indicate that the extent of the differences across level is mediated by discipline and genre, reflecting patterns observed in research on disciplinary variation in professional academic writing.

Interview with Douglas Biber

BG: During your career, you have used corpus linguistics to investigate a wide range of language varieties, both synchronically and diachronically, cross-linguistically, and in terms of their use of varying linguistic structures (including grammar, lexico-grammar, phraseology, and discourse structure). But underlying most of your research is the theme of register variation—that variation in language corresponds to differences in the characteristics of the situations in which it is used. How and when did you first become interested in register variation? DB: Once you’ve asked it, this is an obvious question. But oddly, it’s not a question that I’ve asked myself before. And it’s kind of hard to come up with a definitive answer. I guess the simplest answer is that my interest in register differences grew out of my early multi-dimensional studies. When I started out on these studies, I was mostly interested in the relationship between speech and writing. But what I ended up finding out was that the whole range of register differences matters. Based on my studies over the years, I have come to believe that the distinction between speech and writing is the most important parameter of register variation for predicting linguistic variation. But at the same time, these studies have consistently shown that all register differences matter; that there will be systematic patterns of linguistic variation associated with any situational parameter of register, including purpose, topic, production circumstances, relation between audience and addressee, etc. So, from this perspective, my interest in register variation emerged from the corpus studies themselves—I was repeatedly confronted with findings that demonstrated the importance of register differences, so I became “interested”! But when I think more about it, there were certainly earlier influences. When I first began to study linguistics, I developed interests in two areas that were not usually taught together: I enjoyed formal linguistics—analyzing phonological and grammatical structures and patterns—but I was also especially interested in the structure of texts and the analysis of natural discourse.

On the complexity of academic writing: Disciplinary variation and structural complexity

Building upon renewed research on the pervasive phrasal or nominal style of academic writing, I investigate the use of phrasal compression and clausal elaboration structures in research articles across six academic disciplines. Results indicate that all disciplines rely on phrasal complexity features to a much greater extent than clausal features. However, these results also show systematic patterns of variation across disciplines, with hard sciences (physics, biology) exhibiting the densest use of phrasal features, followed by social sciences (applied linguistics, political science), and then humanities disciplines (history, philosophy). Furthermore, the patterns for clausal features displayed the opposite trend: most frequent in humanities and least frequent in hard sciences. Keywords: Complexity; clausal elaboration; phrasal compression; disciplinary writing; informational discourse; research articles