Abstract
It is almost impossible today to imagine the study of written academic English without the contribution of corpus linguistics. Corpora provide textual information which represent a speaker’s experience of language in a particular domain and so offer evidence of typical patterning in academic texts. It is a method which focuses on community practices and the ways members of particular disciplines see and discuss the world. In this chapter I describe some key studies which contribute to a corpus-informed understanding of academic writing in English. These show that a range of features have been found to occur and behave in dissimilar ways in different disciplinary and genre environments, indicating that academic discourse is a myriad of texts differing across contexts than a single entity. This will cover a state-of- the-art overview and highlight four central papers in this area, identifying their research questions, describing their methods, summarizing the major findings and discussing their importance. I will then describe a representative work in greater detail, focusing on one of my own studies which explores whether the considerable pressures on academics to publish and gain visibility for their work has led authors to rhetorically ‘hype’ their studies.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Cambridge Handbook on English Corpus Linguistics |
| Editors | R. Reppen, L. Goulart, D. Biber |
| Place of Publication | Cambridge, UK |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Edition | 2 |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 14 Jan 2025 |