6 - The loss of explicitness in academic research writing

Summary

Chapter 6 revisits and extends the discussion of the stereotype that academic research writing is structurally elaborated. Through extensive text examples, we demonstrate how phrasal grammatical structures may be considered extremely compressed alternatives to more elaborated clausal constructions. Thus, we connect the increasing and dense use of these compressed phrasal structures with an increasingly inexplicit expression of meaning in academic writing. This chapter presents detailed qualitative analyses of the extent to which grammatical structures are explicit or implicit, including explicitness of reference, passives, and nominalization; the inexplicit meaning relationship associated with phrasal nominal pre- and post-modifiers; and the use of colons as compressed clausal connectors in contrast to explicit linking adverbials. This chapter highlights many of the ways in which the compressed, phrasal discourse style of academic writing results in inexplicit meaning relationships, and show that these inexplicit meanings are in fact contrary to the often-held perceptions of academic writing as explicitly encoding logical relationships.