"Agile" and "Uptight" Genres: The Corpus-based Approach to Language Change in Progress
Abstract
This paper is a follow-up study to previous investigations based on the analysis of parallel British and American corpora from the early 1960s and 1990s. It focuses on variables that are suspected to contribute to the growing "colloquicdisation " of the norms of written English, that is, a narrowing of the gap between spoken and written norms. Such a shift in stylistic preferences has been observed in both socio-cultural approaches to language and corpus-based studies. Contrasting material from the press and academic prose sections of standard one-million-word corpora, we are able to show that the two genres differ in the degree to which they are open to innovations or prone to retain conservative features. What we are proposing is a cline of openness to innovation ranging from "agile " to "uptight" genres.
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Academic genres appear to change only slowly.
“Academic genres, however, appear to change only slowly so that Hundt and Mair (1999: 221) suggest that they reside at the more conservative end of 'a cline of openness to innovation ranging from 'agile' to 'uptight' genres'.”
From Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance (2016) · cites this paper as Hundt and Mair (1999)
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Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance
Hyland, K., & Jiang, F. (. (2016) · Written Communication · doi:10.1177/0741088316650399 · Cited by 268 · see citing works
- Authors
- Hundt, M., & Mair, C.
- Affiliations
- University of Freiburg (DE)
- Venue
- International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
- Publisher
- John Benjamins Publishing Company
- Published
- 1999-12-31
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 221-242
- ISSN
- 1384-6655 (ISSN-L)
- 1569-9811
- OpenAlex
- W2051773373
- Cited by
- 383
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 36 · 2020: 31 · 2019: 74 · 2018: 59 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 13 · 2015: 13 · 2014: 55 · 2013: 6 · 2012: 7
- FWCI
- 14.80
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (publishedVersion)
- FreiDok plus (Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg) (submittedVersion)
- Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Linguistic research and analysis
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Discourse Analysis in Language Studies
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Linguistic Variation and Morphology
- Keywords
- colloquialization, written vs. spoken language, genre variation, openness to innovation, British and American English, newspaper language, academic writing, stylistic preferences, language change
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