5 - The functional extension of phrasal grammatical features in academic writing

Summary

Chapter 5 extends the quantitative trends documented in Chapters 3 and 4 to explore the ways in which the phrasal grammatical style of academic writing is innovative in the ways in which it packages information in discourse: 1) by presenting information in noun phrases rather than in clauses, and 2) by presenting information in phrasal modifiers rather than in clausal modifiers. Chapter 5 relies upon qualitative, functional analyses of phrasal devices that function as nominal pre-modifiers, as well as devices functioning as nominal post-modifiers to demonstrate that these historical developments are not merely quantitative or stylstic trends. Rather, the analyses demonstrate that there have been important extensions to the grammatical/discourse functions of these devices accompanying the increases in frequency of use. The evidence in this chapter provides strong confirmation that the general pattern of historical development in academic prose is toward maximally compressed phrasal structures.