Nominal constructions in spoken academic Englishes: A quantitative corpus-based approach

Abstract

Abstract Academic English was traditionally treated as a monolithic register with respect to grammar, but recent research has shown that there is considerable variation across modes, dialects, research traditions and disciplines. We apply two quantitative corpus-linguistic methods (keyword analysis and a variant using PoS-grams instead of words) to investigate noun-noun and adjective-noun sequences in two discipline-specific Academic Englishes, that of the Arts and Humanities and that of the Physical Sciences. We show that the function of the various constructions underlying these sequences are exploited in different ways in these discipline clusters, in accordance with specific communicative needs. In the Physical Sciences, there is a need for standardized terminology. Noun-noun compounds are the preferred strategy for creating this terminology, with a specific adjective-noun construction involving relational adjectives playing a minor part and syntactic adjective-noun constituents playing no particular role. In the Arts and Humanities, there is a need for precise ad-hoc descriptions, and syntactic adjective-noun constituents are the preferred way of doing so. This difference accounts for the previously observed distribution, confirmed in our study, that noun-noun sequences are more typical for the natural sciences and adjective-noun sequences are more typical for the humanities.