Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English

Register analysis and ESP pedagogy: Noun-phrase modification in a corpus of English for military navy submariners

“…These studies highlight the fact that the frequency and distribution of linguistic features are extremely sensitive to the functions performed by the texts where they are used, which makes the case for detailed analysis and research of registers which are of interest to specific groups of users. Biber et al (1999) found that, when compared with conversation and fiction registers, noun modification is exceptionally common in academic writing, and that about 60% of all nouns are premodified, postmodified or both. For the authors, this high degree of modification can be explained by the need to specify complex meaning.…”

“…Hutter, J.A (2015) tested Biber et al´s (1999) findings by examining a corpus of research articles from the fields of applied linguistics and language teaching. She studied the connection between IMRD article sections (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion) and six different types of noun modification: relative clauses, ing-clause postmodifiers, ed-clause postmodifiers, prepositional postmodifiers, premodifying nouns, and attributive adjectives.…”

“…These randomly-generated lines were annotated individually for the following features (Biber et al, 1999): presence/absence of modification, type of modification, type of postmodification and co-concurrence of pre and postmodification.…”

“…The notion of register has contributed to our understanding of how communication is mediated by communicative situational factors. Biber et al (1999) established a corpusdriven comparison of a wealth of linguistic features across four broad registers, namely, academic writing, conversation, news language and fiction, revealing that the frequency distribution of different grammatical features varied systematically. In other words, the lexico-grammatical fabric of language is register sensitive.…”

“…In other words, the lexico-grammatical fabric of language is register sensitive. We use the term register in this paper within the framework established by Biber et al (1999) and Biber & Conrad (2009) as a variety of language that can be characterized by both the situation in which it is used and how the language is used. Our research does not compare registers within a discipline or specific sections in texts (Swales 1990).…”