Reader perceptions of linguistic variation in published academic writing

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate relationships between the linguistic choices of writers and reader perceptions of writing quality and style in published academic writing. The dual methodology introduced in this study consists of Biber's well-established Multi-Dimensional (MD) analysis, which is used to measure and interpret co-occurrence patterns among linguistic features, and Stylistic Perception (SP) analysis, a new method of investigating linguistic variation from the perspective of reader perceptions. The three major goals of this study are to describe published academic writing in terms of (1) its linguistic variation, (2) its perceived quality and style, and (3) relationships between the linguistic choices of authors and the perceptions of readers.;The research in this study is based on a corpus of 150 samples of published academic writing from three publication types (journal articles, university textbooks, and popular academic books) in two disciplines (biology and history). After presenting a detailed overview of this corpus, I describe the development and application of a comprehensive framework for situational analysis to the different varieties in the corpus. A new MD analysis of linguistic variation in the corpus reveals five dimensions of variation that are functionally interpreted. Key patterns in language use along these dimensions are explored within and across registers, disciplines and publication types. For the SP analysis, an instrument was developed to measure reader perceptions of writing quality and style and administered to 25 participant readers per text. A battery of reliability assessments strongly supports the reliability and usefulness of this instrument. Similar to the MD analysis, co-occurrence patterns among the perceptual items are measured, revealing two underlying dimensions of perceptual variation. After interpreting these dimensions and applying them to the texts in the corpus, I explore variation in reader perceptions within and across registers, disciplines, and publication types. Correlational techniques are used to measure relationships between the language used by authors of published academic prose and the perceptions of readers. Regression analyses show that the linguistic choices of authors can predict reader perceptions. All of the quantitative results are complemented by thorough qualitative investigations of discourse patterns in individual texts in order to provide a more complete description of academic prose.;In summary, this dissertation helps to increase our understanding of the linguistic and stylistic characteristics of published academic writing. These findings can be used to prepare students to successfully read and comprehend writing in the university context. This research also reveals the perceptions readers have towards different writing styles which can be used to help writers produce successful register-specific prose and improve the effectiveness of their individual writing styles.